A woman from Palm Beach, Florida, hit a Damien Hirst sculpture that is said to be worth $3 million when she drove her Rolls-Royce through the backyard of Steven Tananbaum, a collector and director of the Museum of Modern Art, and his wife Lisa. In late March, a 66-year-old woman who was not named drove her Rolls-Royce sedan through the backyard of a home on Canterbury Lane in Palm Beach, where it hit a sculpture that the owners told the Palm Beach Daily News was worth $3m. The Tananbaums' yard appears to have Hirst's Sphinx (2017) pushed off its base, according to photos shared by the Palm Beach Police. During the 2017 Venice Biennale, the sculpture was part of a show called Hirst's Treasures From the Wreck of the Unbelievable.
Other pieces in the show, like Sphinx, were made to look like they had been found in an abandoned shipwreck and were still covered with coral, barnacles, urchins, and other plants and animals from the ocean. It was Hirst's first big show in almost ten years, and many people saw it as a return. Hirst also made a fake documentary for the show, which said that the pieces were left at the bottom of the sea after the boat carrying them sank off the coast of East Africa.
Credit: Palm Beach Police
Police told the Palm Beach Daily News that after hitting Sphinx, the woman drove her luxury car through the Tananbaums' garden and over a seawall, ending up on the beach next to their property. A police report says that when the cops found the car, it was hanging from the seawall with one end touching the beach. Police told the Palm Beach Daily News that the woman couldn't remember the hours before the crash and didn't seem to be drunk. When asked for a comment, the Tananbaums' representatives did not answer right away.
Credit: Palm Beach Police
The Tananbaums have a lot of modern and post-war art in their home. Steven was asked to step down as a MoMA trustee in 2019 because his hedge fund, GoldenTree Asset Management, had ties to Puerto Rico's financial problem. In 2019, at least $2.5 billion of Puerto Rico's debt was owned by GoldenTree. "After Hurricane Maria, people died, but Tananbaum didn't think twice about making money off of the tragedy. Gina De Jesus, an organizer with New York Communities for Change, said in 2019 that MoMA needs to do something if it cares more about people than money. After two years of court battles, Tananbaum settled a lawsuit with dealer Larry Gagosian and his own gallery in early 2020. Tananbaum had said that Gagosian never gave him three Jeff Koons sculptures that he had paid $13 million for.
Jean Dubreil