A £2.4 million sculpture by Damien Hirst has taken a dent. The Sphinx, a coral piece created by Hirst, above, in 2017, was ploughed into by a Rolls Royce, a police report reveals. The car knocked the piece, which is held in a private collection, off its pedestal before careering through a fence in Palm Beach, California. A damage assessment will follow soon.
The Sphinx is one of the cheaper Hirst pieces around. The Golden Calf sold for more than £10 million in 2008, a world record for the sale of a single piece of art. Hirst has said that For the Love Of God, his platinum skull cast studded with over 8,000 diamonds, was sold to a consortium for £50 million. This month, he began selling AI-generated paintings and NFTs starting at £1,200.
Did Truss’s tour of the M25 leave her American hosts a bit baffled?
Liz Truss made a painful transition to US politics yesterday at a speech in Washington DC. She told an audience at the Right-wing Heritage Foundation about her “setback” last autumn: being ousted from Downing Street after 49 days. Truss helpfully translated British terms for her American audience, explaining that her political enemies, people who “live in London, they live in the M25”, are better known in the US as “the people who live in the beltway”, the area around Washington. “Ordinary voters,” she explained, were “the people on Main Street, or the high street in the UK.”
British Museum returns Tahitian treasure temporarily
The British Museum is returning a treasured statue to the Polynesian islands. The A’a, right, has been held in Bloomsbury since 1911 but there was no obvious place to display it in the museum, which lacks an Oceania exhibition. The Museum of Tahiti will have it for the next three years but don’t expect a precedent to be set for other treasures held by the museum. This seems like a one-off.
Your Tories Need You
The Tories are hiring in preparation for a general election. The latest job advert, for a Candidate Engagement Manager, says “the objective of the role is to be election ready, attract & recruit candidates that represent modern Britain”. Speculation has been rife about the timing of an election. Latest reports say Rishi Sunak will go to the country in autumn 2024, so they should have plenty of time to prepare.
Last night in town
Small-screen star Keeley Hawes hosted a launch party for No 7’s new skincare range at the Science Museum in Kensington last night. Georgia Harrison, a writer and former Love Islander, also attended. On Berkeley Square, Asian restaurant Sexy Fish tried out a new menu called The Lost Treasures, which they say is inspired by a range of fish-shaped handbags ($5,995 each) from Judith Leiber Couture. Novelist Yomi Adegoke, singer Cinderella Balthazar and the models Rahi Chadda and Mathias Le Fèvre were there.
