DAMIEN HIRST

Not one but two Venetian museums, the Palazzo Grassi and the Punta della Dogana, have opened their doors to what has perhaps been one of the most anticipated (and guarded, prior to its opening) exhibitions of the year: Damien Hirst’s Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable. The show comes after years of uncharacteristic silence from art’s king of controversy, and marks somewhat of a high-stakes comeback for Hirst, whose career has been suffering since the economic and art market crash of 2008, and whose most recent exhibition, 2014’s Schizophrenogenesis, was indifferently—even poorly—received. Treasures is a very ambitious affair. It features 190 works, presenting a visual fairy tale that wants visitors to believe that everything on display was dredged up from a shipwreck off the coast of East Africa that contained a stash of treasure belonging to a former slave by the name of Cif Amotan II. Objects on display include an 18-metre-tall headless Buddha made of jade, a Hydra, and figures from mythology, theology and the artist’s imagination: a goddess whose face looks oddly like Kate Moss, a marble pharaoh that resembles Rihanna, and a bronze statue of Mickey Mouse covered with centuries of marine accretion. Unsurprisingly, critics have been divided on the show’s artistic value, but if the general astonishment and bewilderment of most attendees is anything to go by, you’re at least in for an interesting, hard-to-forget visual experience. Which is perhaps what Hirst intended.