"Damien Hirst's Diamond Skull on view in Florence at Palazzo Vecchio"

"The work stands in the great tradition of the 'Memento Mori', where an image or an object serves to remind us of our mortality," professes the Palazzo Vecchio press release (via e-flux bulletin), which also calls Hirst's For the Love of God a "tour de force".


In the future will archaeologists dig up this old relic and finally understand why the age of capitalism annihilated human life as we know it?

"They were so obsessed with status symbols that they were encrusting their own skulls with diamonds," they'll say, "no wonder they all got blown up in their own nuclear waste, they couldn't see past the shiny lights of their own craniums."