Hirst's pickled dove leaves Manhattan art world drooling

• Ed Pilkington in New York
• guardian.co.uk,
• Friday November 9 2007
• Article history

Hirst at the Gagosian Gallery. Photograph: David Levene

Dennis Hopper certainly seemed to like it. "This is his best piece of work I think I have ever seen," he extolled.

"This to me covers surrealism, the history of art, the hanging of meat ... the whole thing is great."

The film star was salivating today over the centrepiece of Damien Hirst's latest art installation-cum-marketing stunt: a 12 ft-high tank that contains 10,000 litres of formaldehyde.

Inside the fluid a diminutive white dove is suspended, its wings outstretched in a metal cage. Flanking it are two brutal halves of a sliced cow, a long string of fat Italian sausages, a well-worn leather armchair and, with a nod to Magritte, an open black umbrella.

The work stands at the front of a Hirst installation that takes over the lobby of Lever House in Park Avenue, Manhattan. Hirst always likes to think big, but School: The Archaeology Of Lost Desires, Comprehending Infinity And The Search For Knowledge, is on a grand scale even by his standards.

He uses the theme of a school of anatomy to draw together many of the strands that have run through his work in the past 15 years.

"I've always wanted to do an anatomy school - it has a lot of threads that come together for me, all in the one idea that you can learn something from art," he says.

The glass-walled lobby is lined not with bookshelves but with medicine cabinets bearing pill boxes and bottles - a familiar Hirst motif - each one topped with a clock that runs backwards at a different speed.

The cow-flanked dove stands at the front of the room, representing the teacher, and in front of it there are three neat rows of "pupils" - 29 pickled sheep, their heads severed from their skinless bodies; and a single shark that looks bemused and ready for mischief at the back of the class. Each "pupil" is illuminated by fluorescent strip lighting - another allusion, this time to Dan Flavin.

"The shark represents individuality," Hirst says as he puts the final touches to the installation before tomorrow night's rock'n'roll opening in front of 2,000 of the New York cultural elite. "The sheep represent uniformity. Through uniform education, people end up as dead sheep; alive, but not much alive."

All the elements, including the sheep, shark, dove, cow, sausages and formaldehyde, have been shipped to New York from his Gloucestershire base in the past three months.

Thirty-foot glass panels had to be removed to get the installation into the lobby, and the floor was reinforced to bear the 15-tonne dove tank.

The idea of an anatomy school emerged after Hirst was invited by the New York property developer, Aby Rosen, to create a work big enough to fill the lobby of his Lever House.

The millionaire already owns several pieces by the artist, including The Virgin Mother, a 34ft bronze statue of a semi-skinned pregnant woman, which has stood in front of the building since 2005.

With a partner, Mr Rosen has paid Hirst $10m (£4.7m) for School, which sounds a lot until you set it against the $100m that was paid last summer for the platinum cast of a human skull that Hirst encrusted with 8,601 diamonds.

As if to underline the point, the artist was wearing a T-shirt today with a sparkling skull printed on it.

It is the kind of silly money that rules out most would-be collectors - even stars such as Dennis Hopper. He got to know Hirst 15 years ago when he saw his celebrated pickled shark at the Saatchi gallery in London, and has been a fan ever since. Does he own any of Hirst's works? "No I don't. But that's only because he got out of hand."