On a Tuesday in October...
On a Tuesday in October 2001, the pricey British artist Damien Hirst assembled an artistic display in the window of a London gallery. It consisted of a collection of half-full coffee cups, ashtrays with cigarette butts, empty beer bottles, a paint-smeared palette, an easel, a ladder, paintbrushes, candy wrappers and newspaper pages strewn about the floor. The work was the centerpiece of a limited-edition art exhibition and was showed off at a V.I.P. preopening party that night. As "an original Damien Hirst," the display had a sales value of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
