THERE'S no getting round the shark: a ton or so of pure killer instinct suspended, in perpetuity, inside a gigantic glass tank filled with formaldehyde solution. It was always going to steal the show devoted to ''Young British Artists'' which opened last week at the Saatchi Gallery, and now it has done so. Its title is The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. But it is known, simply, as The Shark.
Rarely can a contemporary British sculpture (if that's the right designation) have been so much dis-cussed before it even existed. For some months now it has been widely known that Damien Hirst, the Great White Hope of British art, was working with a Great White Shark. (In fact, three days before he placed his order with an Australian fisherman, the Great White was declared an endangered species, so Hirst has had to settle for a Tiger Shark.) The Shark is rumoured to have cost Charles Saatchi more than pounds 50,000, but the news from Boundary Road is that it was worth it. It will be remembered as one of the most remark-able British works of this, er, fin de siecle.
There will no doubt be those who wonder whether a real, dead shark, simply pickled in formaldehyde and placed on display, can justly be described as a work of art. Had it been commissioned by, say, the Tate, The Sun's headline-writers would already have gone to work on it: pounds 50,000 FOR FISH, WITHOUT CHIPS. But although The Shark might be hard to defend, that's no reason not to try.
Hirst has adopted a classic strategy of Surreal, Dadaist and later modern art, which consists in the re-moval of something from its usual context (Marcel Duchamp did it with the urinal, Carl Andre with the...
