Just In Time For Halloween; More Wild Skulls By Artist Damien Hirst

above: one from each of Hirst's series; Hypnotic, Transcendent and Hallucinatory Heads.

A lot of blogs have been covering artist Michael Leon's colored gypsum skulls lately and I've seen many a post on everything from crayon skulls to skull flash drives. But if you're an art fan and a skull fan, I can't think of a more fun combination that the series of Damien Hirst's 'spinner' painted skulls.


above: Hirst with his diamond encrusted skull

I'm sure most of you are familiar with artist Damien Hirst's diamond and platinum skull. Lauded as the singularly most expensive piece of sold art at 100 million dollars, the skull, titled "For The Love Of God".


above: For The Love Of God, the 100 million dollar diamond encrusted platinum skull by Damien Hirst

A common theme in his own, as well as many other artist's work, Hirst has created several other versions of skulls that you may not know about and that are available for purchase.

In this latest series of 50 painted skulls are three categories manifested as three variations of form: Hallucinatory Head, Hypnotic Head and Transcendent Head, with each skull a unique result of the now famous and highly sought after ‘Spin’ painting technique.

The skull is one of a number of recurring motifs not only in Damien Hirst’s work but also in the history of art, and in this special edition has been reworked back in to his signature. The technique is simple but the result relies on complex ideas about mortality and the history of mankind, touching on specific anthropological and historical readings, with compelling, celebratory and seductive results.

A suggested memento mori of a more uplifting and contemporary slant, Hirst’s proximity to the subject of death is ever fresh, rewarding and daring, seeking to challenge the often morbid art historical approach to the subject. His skulls engage, they fix us with their own kind of gaze, imploring us to see the comedy within them. Here, the image of death is less unknowable, more approachable, a little lighthearted, even, whilst possessing something of an ancient relic or offering to the gods. Influences of the Mexican celebration, Dia de los Muertos, fuse ritual and anthropology with ornament, demonstrating the crux of Hirst’s practice wherein the philosophical and eternal become part of the vocabulary of modern life and modern aesthetic.


The Hallucinatory Heads


These are multi-colored glossy spinner paints on partial plastic skulls (no lower jawbone):




The Transcendent Heads


These are multi-colored glossy spinner paints on plastic full skulls with eyeballs:





The Hypnotic Heads


These are black and white glossy spinner painted plastic heads of full skulls with empty eye sockets:



specs for all:
210 x 140 x 140 mm
Household gloss on plastic skull

all information and images are courtesy of The Other Criteria, which is the only place where these skulls shown above can be purchased.

Other Must See Skull Posts:

• The Sensory Deprivation Skull:

read about it here.

The Limited Edition Bell & Ross Skull Watch:

read about it here.

Dan Aykroyd's Crystal Head Vodka:

Read about it here.

If you like skull items, be sure to check out the over 135 skull items I've posted on This Next

When Gucci Isn't Luxe Enough As Is, Go To Republica

above: Republica adds a diamond and platinum buckle to a Gucci belt



If you're at all familiar with Stuart Hughes and his company Goldstriker, you know him as the ultra luxe purveyor of the world's most luxurious mobile phones clad in gold, diamond and platinum as well as some outrageous gifts like diamond studded golf balls and diamond chess sets.



above: some of the items available from Stuart Hughes and Goldstriker include a gold plated Bang & Olufsen Beo remote



His latest venture, along with his wife, Katharine, is a very high end fashion site called Republica in which they are customizing already luxe clothing and accessories with diamonds and precious metals.

With brands like Gucci, Dolce & Gabbana, Prada and Cavalli, they are creating limited versions of some of their products by adding platinum, diamonds, gemstones, exotic skins and more in limited numbers to make them even more exclusive..... and expensive.




The site just launched on October 5th and there are very few items being offered so far (3 to be exact), but here's a peek at the first items being offered by Republica.

Gucci Belt with Diamond and Platinum Buckle:
The Gucci belt below has a buckle recreated by Stuart Hughes in platinum and diamonds and there are only 3 available.



The price? a whopping $168,709.00 USD

The Dolce and Gabbana belt shown below is also limited to 3 and has 53 indivually set diamonds of VVS1 quality totalling a carat weight of 26.5.


The price on the above D&G belt is $91,879.00 USD.

Python Skin Blackberry


The python skin blackberry has lots of VS1 diamonds on the front at the bottom as well as on the back and will run you $9,658.54 USD

If you've got that kind of coin (and God bless you, if you do) start shopping here.

Can't Afford To Spend 100 Million Bucks? How About $10,000? For The Love Of God Silkscreens by Damien Hirst.

A few weeks ago, Damian Hirst's latest creation graced the cover of the New York Times Sunday Magazine (as well as getting coverage on many a blog). The subject was his latest creation, the world's most expensive piece of art. A life sized platinum skull set with diamonds.

This article reprinted below by William Shaw accompanied the piece:

It’s particularly fitting that the title of Damien Hirst’s new headline-grabbing work came from an exasperated exclamation of his mother’s: “For the love of God, what are you going to do next?”

The answer, pictured here, is a life-size platinum skull set with 8,601 high-quality diamonds. If, as expected, it sells for around $100 million this month, it will become the single most expensive piece of contemporary art ever created. Or the most outrageous piece of bling.

At home in Devon, Hirst insists it’s absolutely the former. “I was very worried for a while, because if it looked like bling — tacky, garish and over the top — we would have failed. But I’m very pleased with the end result. I think it’s ethereal and timeless.”

For Hirst, famous pickler of sharks and bovine bisector, all his art is about death. This piece, which was cast from an 18th-century skull he bought in London, was influenced by Mexican skulls encrusted in turquoise. “I remember thinking it would be great to do a diamond one — but just prohibitively expensive,” he recalls. “Then I started to think — maybe that’s why it is a good thing to do. Death is such a heavy subject, it would be good to make something that laughed in the face of it.”

The dazzle of the diamonds might outshine any meaning Hirst attaches to it, and that could be a problem. Its value as jewelry alone is preposterous. Hirst, who financed the piece himself, watched for months as the price of international diamonds rose while the Bond Street gem dealer Bentley & Skinner tried to corner the market for the artist’s benefit. Given the ongoing controversy over blood diamonds from Africa, “For the Love of God” now has the potential to be about death in a more literal way.

“That’s when you stop laughing,” Hirst says. “You might have created something that people might die because of. I guess I felt like Oppenheimer or something. What have I done? Because it’s going to need high security all its life.”

The piece is not exactly the stuff of public art, but Hirst says he hopes that an institution like the British Museum might put it on display for a while before it disappears into a vault, never to be seen again. Whether the piece is seen or not, Hirst will likely go down in the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s most extravagant artist.

“I hadn’t thought about that!” he suddenly snorts with laughter. “I deal with that with all my work. The markup on paint and canvas is a hell of a lot more than on this diamond piece.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

At the going rate of 100 million dollars, chances are you won't be buying it.

But now, a London gallery is selling limited edition prints of this piece, still pricey at 10,000+ USD, but a mere pittance compared to $100,000,000.00

In conjunction with Damien Hirst’s exhibition ‘Beyond Belief’, White Cube Gallery announce the release of eight new limited edition works.

These works include a series of silkscreens depicting Hirst’s extraordinary diamond skull ‘For the Love of God’, a life-size cast of a human skull in platinum, covered entirely by 8,601 VVS to flawless pavé-set diamonds. In addition to these silkscreens there are three works on canvas, each with paracetamol pills and syringes. These relate closely to the new series of ‘Fact’ and ‘Biopsy’ paintings which focus upon issues surrounding Western medicine, and continue Hirst’s long standing interest in the themes of life and death.




Want one of your own? Click here

A little about DAMIAN HIRST:
Damien Hirst was born in Bristol, England in 1965. While still a student at Goldsmith's College in 1988, he curated the now renowned student exhibition, Freeze, held in east London. In this exhibition, Hirst brought together a group of young artists who would come to define cutting-edge contemporary art in the 1990s. In 1991, he had his first solo exhibition at the Woodstock Street Gallery, entitled In and Out of Love, in which he filled the gallery with hundreds of live tropical butterflies, some of which were hatched from the monochrome canvases that hung the walls. In 1992, he was part of the ground breaking Young British Artists exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery. In this show, he exhibited his now famous Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a tiger shark in a glass tank of formaldehyde. That same year he was nominated for the prestigious Tate Gallery Turner Prize, and later won that coveted award in 1995.

Hirst's best known works are his paintings, medicine cabinet sculptures, and glass tank installations. For the most part, his paintings have taken on two styles. One is an arrangement of color spots with titles that refer to pharmaceutical chemicals, known as Spot paintings. The second, his Spin paintings, are created by centrifugal force, when Hirst places his canvases on a spinner, and pours the paint as they spin. In the medicine cabinet pieces Hirst redefines sculpture with his arrangements of various drugs, surgical tools, and medical supplies. His tank pieces, which contain dead animals, that are preserved in formaldehyde, are another kind of sculpture and directly address the inevitable mortality of all living beings. All of Hirst's works contain his ironic wit, and question art's role in contemporary culture.

Hirst's first exhibition with Gagosian Gallery, entitled No Sense of Absolute Corruption, was in 1996 at the now-closed SoHo location in New York. Superstition is Damien Hirst's first show at the Beverly Hills space.

For the Official Damien Hirst Website, click here.

If Mom Likes Diamonds, Bling's the Thing

Does Mom like diamonds? Don't be a dork. That's a rhetorical question.
Well, here's a few dazzling items if you feel like dropping some serious coin for Mother's Day:

Asanti's Diamond studded wheels $1 million dollars for the set:


www.asantiwheels.com

Diamond studded eyelashes by She Uemera:


Originally created by Gina Brooke, shu uemura Artistic Director, exclusively for Madonna - These custom mink false eyelashes are adorned with 0.75 carats total weight of hand-faceted diamonds featuring featuring a unique new diamond cut - the "Star Shimmer Cut".
A single pair of the $10,000 shu uemura false eyelashes will be exclusively available at seven Neiman Marcus stores. For inquiries, please contact
customer service.
Or if you want them with 'diamante' diamonds (crystal), go here.

Luvaglio's Million Dollar Diamond Studded Laptop:


It is often quite easy to take your trusty computer for granted. This, despite the incredible convenience and entertainment it affords you. But for those who want everything they touch to be of a certain level of quality, including everyday items, Luvaglio has the answer. According to reports, the London-based company is planning a million dollar laptop computer – yes, thats $1,000,000 for what is essentially an appliance. And yet, for the people who could afford this who made their money on a computer just like it, the asking price could just be worthwhile considering the added features such as an auto-cleaning screen, state-of-the-art Blu-ray optical drive, and lots of solid-state memory. It is also said to have a diamond on the start button, although from the “By Appointment Only” website, it is hard to confirm.
www.luvaglio.com

Gold-plated diamond studded camera:


The Minox DC1011 gold-plated edition is really going to woo you with its shine and sparkles as it comes wrapped in 24K gold and a handful of diamonds. The Minox DC1011 digital camera is a perfect thing for the bling-thing lovers.

The blinged Minox DC1011 (aka the carat) features ten 2-millimeter 0.03 carat diamonds encrusted around its lens. It manages to pack 10.1-megapixel CCD sensor, 3x optical zoom, 2.5-inch TFT display, 32MB onboard memory and SD card slot to hold up to 2GB.

The diamond encrusted Mercedes Benz SL600:




Diamond-encrusted Ambilight FlatTV from Philips:


Philips Electronics unveiled this stunning diamond-encrusted Ambilight FlatTV to celebrate its one millionth Ambilight FlatTV. The 42-inch Ambilight LCD HDTV features 225 carats of diamonds that are applied along the sides and edges of the TV’s frame to accentuate the ambient effect. Seems like Philips took inspiration from the creators of Yalos diamond TV set (pictured below).

Yalos Diamond TV set studded with 160 real diamonds:


The stunning diamond studded LCD HDTV is one of the most luxurious and pricey TVs in the world. Keymat’s Yalos Diamond has a 46” screen and studded diamonds on the edges of screen.

The diamond studded TV has been priced at an exclusive cost of $130,000. Appeared at IFA show, 2006 in Berlin.

Diamond Binky:


An exclusive line of custom Diamond Pacifiers, the newest trend in celebrity baby gifting is available at ItsmyBinky.com. The glittery Diamond Pacifiers feature over 278 pave cut white diamonds totaling 3 carats with a 14K European nickel-free white gold base. An exact replica of a real pacifier, Diamond Pacifiers features a genuine silicone nipple and a real moving handle. Though it has a silicone nipple, this pacifier is merely for looks. Jeweled pacifiers are choking hazards. This Diamond pacifier undoubtedly makes a fabulous, upscale souvenir for $17,000. Mathis Riiber, founder of Itsmybinky.com, had quoted that the pricey aide was originally made for Donald and Melania Trump's son Barron William. The company also offers customized pacifiers of colored diamonds for high-end customers.

Below is the $17,000 diamond binky, supposedly a gift to Brad and Angelina:

www.itsmybinky.com

Goldvish's Diamond encrusted cell phone:



In fact, this phone is so expensive that the manufactures even go so far as to recommend a particular car that, they feel, would compliment the most expensive phone in the world admirably.

If I tell you that the car they name is none other than the Bugatti Veyron, then perhaps you’ll get the picture.

The Piece Unique Vertu, whilst having been named with the aplomb of a road-kill, boasts a casing exquisitely manufactured from 18 carat white gold, 120 carats of diamonds encrusted across almost its entire surface and a little platinum just for good measure.

I have searched for a feature list concerning this phone but I am yet to find one. Certainly the company’s website feels that such details are obviously of little concern - even if the phone costs a staggering $1.2 Million USD (€1 Million).

Then again, I suppose if you have to ask you probably can’t afford it.

www.goldvish.com

The Diamond Cell Phone Strap:

The diamond phone owners might would like to pimp-out their ultra-blingy sets even more with this diamond studded mobile phone strap that costs way more then a majority of the luxury phones in the market. Or if you don’t possess a diamond Vertu or a Goldvish, you can add a million dollar appeal to your handset with this dangling diamond mobile phone charm! This one-of-a-kind diamond-studded strap is designed by Diaddict, a designer Japanese brand that specializes in jewelry. The luxurious phone accessory features a 6.02-carat yellow diamond, as well as 2.1-carats in clear, white diamonds, a .61-ct. blue diamond and a .36-ct. pink diamond and is currently on display at the Takashimaya Co. departments store in Nihombashi, Japan for a listed price of $842,000.

Diamond Studded Cricket Ball:


One simply has to wonder what lengths people will go to gain attention. Just when you thought that you had seen it all, in comes the mother of all bling! Bollywood actress Mahima Chaudhary holds one of the diamond studded cricket ball to be presented to the best Indian Cricketer of the ongoing World Cup Series at West Indies. The other ball will be presented to the Best Interim Player. There are 5,728 diamonds encrusted on each ball, which costs about $68,500. Well all the fuss is fine if the team is a solid rocker, but apparently team India seems to be having starting troubles, considering it lost its match to Bangladesh! Too bad we don’t play cricket out here west!

$150,000 Diamond Encrusted Bentley Shifter Knob:


icedoutemz.com

Blinged out ipod:

$15,000.00
Over 580 diamonds worth 10.32 carats in total and set on 120g of 14K white gold.
www.intergem.com


This diamond-studded bottle of Kattus Hochriegel is worth €10,000 (US$13,200)

www.johann-kattus.at/

The Snow Drive, A diamond studded flash drive:


Blinged USB flash drive. It is called as the Snow Drive because of the casing made up of 18 carat White Gold with three strips of 1.44 carat white diamonds totaling to 96 on the sides and comes with 18 carat white gold chain. It features a Sandisk 4GB drive. Price: 9950 GBP ($18,856).

Not enough memory OR diamonds? Try this:



For the super-rich tycoons who need to carry useful business data all the time, Mii Stor has created a 4GB flash drive made from diamonds and white gold to pack your million dollar data in equally luxurious style. The Snow drive is a Sandisk 4GB drive encased in 18ct white gold studded with 96 white diamonds totalling 1.44ct. And, with the white gold chain, the precious little thing can be worn round your neck too. So, another chance to show off your wealth in an elegant yet geeky manner. The shiny flash drive retails for around $19,000. But, if more storage capacity is what you are looking for then leave the bling thing and get yourself the Buslink Pro 2 flash drive from CDW that is though not made of gold or platinum but it packs 64GB of data in it.
www.stor-data.com

Diamond Studded Flat iron by M1:

For the woman who has it all, this Diamond Encrusted Straightener from Selfridges is a must-have to match your high couture collection. The limited-edition hair tamer is made in 18-carat yellow and white gold and is encrusted with six Dutch Crown Rose Cut diamonds for that luxury trim! The luxury cosmetic equipment sells for approx $15,000. USD exclusively from Selfridges on Oxford Street. And, the device comes encased in an Italian leather pouch.

And finally, perfume infused with real diamond dust (And a rockin' name to boot). Stoned Perfume with Real Diamond dust:

Hailed by designer Solange Azagury Partridge as 'the most fun one can have being stoned without breaking the law', Stoned is a scent designed to create an addictive animal attraction (rahhh!) and is infused with diamond dust . Created as part of a jewellery collection, it's no wonder the bottle looks like a work of art and costs roughly $350.00 USD.
www.solangeazagurypartridge.com


There's more, too, Don't forget to check out:

Real diamond flatware by Christofle here.

Diamonds suspended in stemware and more from Diamonds In Glass here.

The Diamond and Platinum Ego laptops here.