Damien Hirst's Diamond Skull: For the Love of God, Its Price and Meaning

Start with the object, because it is stranger than most photographs make it look. White Cube, the gallery that first showed it, lists the medium as platinum, diamonds and human teeth. Hirst began with a real human skull from the eighteenth century, generally described as that of a man of about 35, according to The Independent. The skull was cast in platinum at life size, and the cast was then paved with diamonds.

The count matters to a lot of people, so here it is plainly: there are 8,601 diamonds on the skull. Tate singles out the largest, a 52.4-carat pink diamond at the forehead, which sits where the eye naturally lands first. The teeth are the one part that was not cast or made. They came from the original skull and were set into the platinum jaw.

So, is it real? The answer has three parts. The diamonds are real, the platinum is real, and the teeth belonged to a real person who lived and died in the 1700s. The skull you see, though, is a cast of that person's skull rather than the bone itself. It is worth holding on to that last detail. Under all the sparkle, the work starts with a person whose name is not recorded.

Ask how much the skull cost and you will get several numbers, because the reports never agreed on one. The Independent cited an estimate of about £15 million for production. Other contemporary reports placed the materials at around £14 million or £12 million, and Guinness World Records lists the reported £12 million materials value in its record for the most expensive materials used in a piece of contemporary art.

The fair way to put it is a range. Making the skull reportedly cost somewhere between £12 million and £15 million, depending on who was reporting and what they counted.

In August 2007, White Cube announced that *For the Love of God* had sold for £50 million, roughly $100 million at the time, to an anonymous investment consortium. The Independent reported that Hirst kept a percentage of the work and that he was himself part of the consortium. Put simply, the artist was on both sides of the deal, which is an unusual position for a seller.

Doubts arrived almost at once. Two days later, The Independent reported that The Art Newspaper had described earlier negotiations at around £38 million, while Hirst's manager denied that any discount had been given. The buyers were never named.

The story took another turn in 2022. Hirst said the skull was still owned jointly by him, White Cube and unnamed investors, and that it was kept in storage in Hatton Garden in London. Artnet News reported that this meant the 2007 sale had never happened in the way it was publicly described.

That leaves the ownership question with a careful answer. The skull is privately owned, the ownership is disputed, and no public museum holds it. Based on Hirst's 2022 statement, the owners include Hirst, White Cube and investors whose names have not been made public. No single owner can be named, and the exact shares have never been disclosed.

The meaning question has as many answers as the price question, but these come from named people rather than rumor.

Tate calls the work a memento mori, the old Latin idea of remembering that you will die, and says it is also about value. A skull on its own has carried that first message in European art for centuries. Encrusting one in diamonds adds the second message, about what people treasure, what they pay for and what none of it can buy back.

Hirst has spoken about both sides. In a 2010 interview with Euronews, he said "the ideas come first and the money is just something you use to make things happen." He also explained the title. *For the Love of God* is religious language, and it is also the thing people exclaim when something is too much. "It has the two meanings," he said. Spanish-language writing on the work uses the title *Por el amor de Dios*.

When the skull traveled to Mexico City, the Museo Jumex described it as bringing together death, belief and value. The museum also said it pays homage to Aztec skulls decorated with turquoise and other precious materials, which places the work in a much older line of skulls made precious on purpose.

Critics leaned hard on the money. The Independent quoted the magazine Apollo saying that "the ideas of an artist have a price far higher than mere gems." Art Review was cooler, calling it "a fashion statement." Both readings are still around, and a visitor can hold them at once: a death's head about mortality, and a death's head about the market.

The skull has traveled more than most people do. Its documented exhibitions run from London in 2007 to Munich in 2024.

It was first shown at White Cube, St James's, in London in 2007. It went to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in 2008 and to the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence in 2010 and 2011. From 4 April to 24 June 2012, Tate Modern displayed it in a purpose-built room in the Turbine Hall during its Hirst retrospective. It appeared in the exhibition Relics in Doha, Qatar, from 10 October 2013 to 22 January 2014, and at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo from 16 September to 15 November 2015. The Museo Jumex in Mexico City showed it in *Damien Hirst: To Live Forever (For a While)*.

Most recently, MUCA exhibited it in Munich from 26 October 2023 to 28 January 2024, inside the MUCA Bunker, a former World War II bunker. Between showings, it goes back into private storage. If you hope to see it in person, watch the announcements from White Cube and from major museums, and confirm dates directly with the venue before you travel.

Skulls have a long run in Western art as a prompt to think about death. In the memento mori and vanitas paintings of earlier centuries, a skull sitting among books, flowers or coins told the viewer that life is short and that worldly pleasures will not last. The Guggenheim also presents the skull in Western art as a memento mori. If the idea is new to you, our story on what memento mori means covers it from the start.

*For the Love of God* sits squarely in that tradition and then turns it up. Instead of painting a skull beside expensive things, Hirst made the skull out of the expensive things. That combination of an old death symbol with platinum, diamonds, a celebrity-scale price and art-market speculation is what gives the work its odd place in contemporary art. Tate calls it one of the most widely recognized works of contemporary art since its debut in 2007.

The Museo Jumex reading adds a second family tree. Aztec skulls decorated with turquoise and other valued materials were precious skulls made on purpose, and the museum connects his work to them. For more skulls that artists have made famous, from paintings to sculpture, see our roundup of famous skull art.

Several things about the skull made people uneasy, and they tend to stack up. It used human remains, a real person's skull and teeth, as the starting point for a luxury object. It was made from materials worth millions before it was even shown. Its announced price of £50 million turned it into a headline about money as much as a work about death.

Then there was the sale. When the artist is part of the group that bought his own work, and the buyers stay anonymous, many observers wondered whether the price was a market result or a statement. The 2022 news that Hirst still co-owned it, as reported by Artnet, brought those questions back. For many critics, the blur between artistic meaning, publicity and investment was the controversy. For others, that blur was exactly what the skull was about.

These are the questions that come up most often about *For the Love of God*.

The diamond skull is a recent chapter in a very old conversation about death and what we value. To see where that conversation started, read about vanitas paintings and what memento mori means. For the bigger story of why skulls carry so much meaning across cultures, start with skull symbolism, and for more skulls that artists have made famous, see famous skull art.