On 31 December, an image to strengthen the resolve of anyone planning to include abstinence from cigarettes among their New Year's resolutions. Damien Hirst's Horror at Home, 1995, is a gigantic fibreglass ashtray into which several binbags filled with cigarette butts - all supposedly smoked at one of the artist's favoured London haunts, the Groucho Club - have been unceremoniously tipped. A thing of beauty and a joy forever it is not; nor was it meant to be.

Hirst explained how he came to think up this unflinchingly direct, somewhat simple-minded and extremely smelly work in an interview given at the time. He had been irritated, he said, by the fastidiousness of a wealthy acquaintance and fellow-smoker:

“I went to some posh person's house and they had a tiny little fucking ashtray, it was about two inches by one inch. And they had a beautiful house. It's like they were trying to reduce the horror to such a point. You could only fit about three cigarette butts in it, then they'd empty it.”

The artist elaborated further, in characteristically rambling fashion:

“I think an ashtray is the most fantastically real thing. But smoking's never talked about. It's probably the most powerful thing of the 20th century. There's no country in the world where smoking is allowed where they don't smoke. Even where it isn't allowed they still find a way to smoke. People are killing themselves. I think suicide is the most perfect thing you can do in life. The whole thing in life is you don't know when you're going to die. It makes everything not make sense, there's this unknown factor. Whereas if you suddenly go, 'OK, I choose to die now', you take the matter into your own hands. So smoking is the perfect way to...

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