A woman in a Rolls Royce knocked off a 3 million dollar sculpture

Tsuktiben Jamir

In a very unlikely event, a woman crashed her Rolls Royce into a 3 million dollar sculpture by Damien Hirst at the garden of the wealthy hedge fund tycoon Steven Tananbaum’s Florida house, damaging it in the process. According to a Palm Beach Police Department incident report, Elizabeth Raese, 66, hit the sculpture in Tananbaum’s yard on the evening of March 31 by driving through his garden. Raese drove through a seawall and a landscaping fence on the property at 102 Canterbury Lane before coming to rest there, according to surveillance video of the unprecedented incident.

The sculpture was Damien Hirst’s coral art sculpture ‘Sphinx’ (2017); it was intended to emulate the impression of 2,000-year-old artwork and artefacts unearthed from a shipwreck and embellished with barnacles, patina, and coral growth. The piece was part of the artist’s 2017 Venice Biennale exhibition, “Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable.”

Despite simply being knocked from its pedestal, the $3 million US sculpture, according to the homeowners, has sustained substantial damage. The woman was assisted to St. Mary’s Medical Centre by the Palm Beach Fire Rescue, where she received medical attention for her wounds. There were no further injuries in the incident. According to Palm Beach Daily News, the woman was removed from her vehicle and medically evaluated, however “Officers said the woman told them she had no recollection of the hours leading up to the crash. The woman did not appear to be intoxicated.”

CCTV footage appears to show that after hitting the sculpture, the vehicle continued on, hitting a landscaping fence, a seawall, and finally the beach, according to police. According to the report, the car’s ultimate resting place was a 5-foot-high seawall hung above the ground, with the front of the car lying on the sand and the back on top. As per the Palm Beach Police Department’s report, Tananbaum’s wife Lisa reportedly said she would require a professional to evaluate the damage further.

Tananbaum founded the GoldenTree Asset Management, which presently has $49 billion in assets under management, and he also serves as its chief investment officer. Tananbaum and his wife Lisa are well-known art collectors who have given to a number of museums and galleries, including the Whitney Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Born in 1965, Damien Hirst is an English conceptual artist, entrepreneur as well as art collector. He is a member of the Young British Artists (YBAs) generation that dominated the UK art scene in the 1990s. According to the 2020 Sunday Times Rich List, he is the richest living artist in the United Kingdom with an estimated net worth of US$384 million. The most significant themes on his artworks are on beauty, immortality, rebirth, and death.

Hirst rose to fame as a result of a body of work that included preserved, occasionally dissected, dead animals in formaldehyde, including sharks, sheep, and cows. The most well-known of them was a 14-foot (4.3 m) long formaldehyde-immersed tiger shark in a glass exhibition case called The ‘Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.’