For the Love of God: The Making of the Diamond Skull

"The skull is out of this world, celestial almost. I tend to see it as a glorious intense victory over death," writes art historian Rudi Fuchs in this creative guide to the making of British artist Damien Hirst’s sculpture For the Love of God, a platinum cast of an 18th-century skull encrusted with 8,601 flawless diamonds and produced at a cost of £14 million. The catalog is a companion publication to the 2007 exhibition “Damien Hirst: Beyond Belief,” at London’s White Cube, where the skull made its debut. Although the work has been surrounded by controversy—from accusations of creative plagiarism to the undocumented sale of the sculpture for £50 million to a consortium that includes Hirst himself—the skull is undoubtedly one of the most extraordinary art objects made in the 21st century. In addition to the Fuchs essay, the catalog includes behind-the-scenes photographs of the making of the skull, studies of the skull by experts in the fields of archaeology and dentistry, and a large foldout image of the skull itself.