The "artist" Damien Hirst exhibited and sold a collection sometime last year comprising of various dead animals pickled in formaldehyde, these animals included a Charolais bull and a pony.

A bull must be fairly easy to purchase, even with the sole intention of murdering it, after all death is the fate of the majority of them.

"The Dream" is the piece that causes me the most concern. The subject of this is a "white" grey pony that let's face it looks remarkably like a Caspian (which considering their rareness I seriously hope it isn't).

There is another piece called "The Broken Dream" whose subject looks a lot like a Welsh Pony.

"The Dream" looked perfectly healthy to me, it would have to for aesthetic reasons, so I would be more than a little surprised if it did die of natural causes. After all Mr. Hirst is going to have a vision of how he wants his project to appear, and I doubt he will take whoever happens to die in the right place at the right time regardless of colour size and type... And lets face it 'white' healthy looking ponies aren't popping their clogs left right and center.

I don't know, but I suspect these ponies were selected while still alive. Has someone sold a beloved animal, perhaps one that they bred, to be turned, unbeknownst to them, into a multi million dollar piece of "art".

Then again what do you expect from a man who described 9/11 as a work of art

All attempts on my behalf to find out the story behind these ponies have proved fruitless and any attempts to spread the word quashed.

To quote Norman Tebbit "Have they gone stark raving mad? The works of the 'artist' are lumps of dead animals. There are thousands of young artists who didn't get a look in, presumably because their work was too attractive to sane people. Modern art experts never learn."

To quote Mr. Hirst "We didn't kill anything. Everything was destined for food." Maybe the sheep, pigs and bull were destined for the meat man, but how many ponies, zebras, doves and sharks are eaten in the UK I ask.

If Mr. Hirst doesn't kill animals why is he planning on building an abattoir at his studio?

Damien Hirst Slaughterhouse. Neighbors of a proposed Damien Hirst studio in Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK are not happy about the artist's plans. He has already been given permission to build an "art gallery, workshop and center of excellence". The problem is that he also plans to build an "abattoir rail" and "fish preparation area". His neighbors are petitioning to have his plans stopped. Kim Trinder, who lives opposite the land in Dudbridge Road, said: "It's disgusting. I don't want a slaughterhouse and dead animals here. He kills them and then wants to put them in a showroom. Who would do that?"


He may have got away with suspending a shark in formaldehyde, pickling sheep and cutting up cows, but Damien Hirst was today accused of "horrific barbarity" after decorating a bicycle with hundreds of dead butterflies.

The artist created the bike for cyclist Lance Armstrong, who will ride it in the final stage of the Tour de France in Paris. The frame and wheels of the bike are covered with the of wings of hundreds of dead butterflies, designed to shimmer in the sunlight for Armstrong, who is competing after recovering from cancer. However, animal rights campaigners hit out at the project, claiming it "ruined the very essence of this man's spirit".


Several species of butterfly had their wings painstakingly removed by Hirst's team before being glued to the bike. Mr Hirst's company would not comment on where the butterflies came from but in previous projects, which include a stained-glass window made from butterfly wings, Hirst has had insects bred specially for him. Species used in the project are believed to include the blue Morpho, which has a bright blue wing, and the buttercup, which has a yellow and black wing pattern.

"This is barbaric and horrific," said Sam Glover of Peta. "Lance Armstrong is all about life - about not dying and about overcoming adversity.

"Damien Hirst is a one-trick pony who ruins the very essence of this man's spirit by associating him with dead butterflies."

"Butterflies are beautiful creatures which should be enjoyed in the wild, not encased in a bike."

Following the race, the bike will be displayed at galleries in Paris and New York, before being auctioned in October to raise funds for Live- strong, Armstrong's cancer charity. The bike is one of six designed by different artists that Armstrong has ridden in this year's tour, and the huge interest in Hirst's work could help it raise as much as £1 million.

Hirst has defended the project. "Lance is an inspiration to many people on many levels," he said. "Bono first approached me about the bike and described Lance to me as 'the greatest sportsman the world has ever known after Ali'.

"It was a great opportunity to work with someone I admire and create the bike - something I've never done before."

Hirst admits his insistence that the project used real butterflies caused problems: "The technical problems were immense, as I wanted to use real butterflies and not just pictures of butterflies, because I wanted it to shimmer when the light catches it like only real butterflies do, and we were trying not to add any extra weight to the bike.

"Doing something crazy like this is ultimately about transportation and not simply transport, and what Lance does when he rides it is the same thing. I think he loves it."

His "creations" sell for exuberant prices, below are some examples:-

The Golden Calf - which sold for £9.2m ($16.5m).

The Kingdom - sold for £9.6m ($17.2m).

The Black Sheep with the Golden Horne - sold for £2.6m.

The Broken Dream - sold for £505,250

The Incredible Journey – sold for £1.1m.


You can view his works here, though I don't recommend it (the broken dream is particularly disturbing):-

The Dream - http://i67.photobucket.com/albums/h296/andycampy/thedreamhirst.jpg

The Broken Dream - http://i67.photobucket.com/albums/h296/andycampy/thebrokendreamhirst1-15mil.jpg

The Golden Calf - http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g195/danimalia/damien%20hirst/slidecalf.jpg

The Black Sheep with the Golden Horn - http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g195/danimalia/damien%20hirst/theblacksheepwiththegoldenhorn.jpg


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Modern artists like to provoke, and there's no surer way to ruffle feathers than to kill, harm or trivialise animals in the name of art.

Back in the 1970s, the art of dying so incensed Spike Milligan that he took a hammer to an exhibit at London's Hayward Gallery. The "artist" had planned to electrocute a tank full of catfish until Milligan (and the RSPCA) intervened.

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More recently, Trapholt art museum in Denmark found itself in hot water over goldfish in a food blender. The "artist", Marco Evaristti, said he wanted people "to do battle with their conscience", so visitors were given the option of pressing the "on" button. Consequently, some fish got liquidised, landing the gallery in both the courts and the headlines (the judge ruled in favour of the gallery, not the fish).

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The Wetterling Gallery in Sweden, meanwhile, became the target of a campaign by Peta (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) for showing photographs by Nathalia Edenmont, who kills mice, rabbits and cats for her work.

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Costa Rican Guillermo Vargas (a supposed artists) put up an installation at an exhibition a little over a year ago at a Nicaraguan art gallery featuring a starving dog. While it is difficult to find out the actual story of the dog, there are two versions that exist. According to the first version, the artist paid a few kids to capture an emaciated, stray dog, who was subsequently tied to the wall in the art gallery with food just out of its reach and after a few days was starved to death. The second version (the one being used by the gallery) says that the dog was present only for the 3-hour duration of the exhibit and was otherwise taken care of and fed.

The artists justification for the capture and tethering of the dog in the gallery is that he wanted to illustrate a point – that ‘tens of thousands of stray dogs starve and die of illness each year in the streets and no one pays them a second thought.’ He certainly made a point, though not the one he was supposedly aiming for. There was massive uproar in response to the exhibition and an excess of 4 million people signed a petition against it, the use and abuse of animals as art, and to prevent the Vargas from participating in the 2008 Bienal Centroamericana in Honduras.

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On March 19, 2008, Parisian artist Adel Abdessened opened an exhibit called “Don’t Trust Me”. Among other things, the show included something that can only be described as a snuff film using animals. The installation included six video screens showing a loop of various animals being bludgeoned to death with a sledgehammer next to a brick wall. The animals included a pig, goat, horse, sheep, and ox. As voiced in concerns from animal welfare groups, the videos were degrading, cruel, didn’t make a point, and simply showed the murder of animals for the sake of art.

The exhibition was removed a few weeks later after thousands of emails and protests in response.

You can find photos of this "exhibition" online, I have never seen them and I never wish too.

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Another self-proclaimed ‘artist’, Wim Delvoye shaves and tortures (tattoos) pigs in Beijing for a living. Among the brandings he has performed are Louis Vuitton logos, various words (including his own name in Walt Disney-style font), smiling faces, mythical creatures, and more. These pigs are sold for thousands of dollars and collectors either keep them as pets or purchase the tattood skins of dead pigs.

You can find a video of this sick "art" on youtube.

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One final point, the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti once said: "If I knew that a cat was closed up behind a painting by Rembrandt and in danger of asphyxiation, I would not hesitate to destroy the canvas immediately."

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