And now, for the low, low price of only $12 million, you too can experience the physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living!

It’s a shark. Just a shark. Funded by advertising legend Charles Saatchi in 1991, Damien Hirst was given carte blanche to create any work he desired. Hirst commissioned a fisherman to catch a shark for £6,000 before preserving it in 4,360 gallons of formaldehyde.  Thirteen years passed before Saatchi sold the shark for a reported $12 million to Steven A. Cohen, a hedge fund billionaire.

A 2007 article in The New York Times described the work as being “simultaneously life and death incarnate in a way you don't quite grasp until you see it, suspended and silent, in its tank. It gives the innately demonic urge to live a demonic, deathlike form.”

But it’s just a shark — and not even the original. The first shark decayed beyond repair and was ultimately replaced. Yet, with a title like The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, maybe it’s something else. Maybe it’s something even more.

WAVE 0.9 is the final WAVE in RUNWAY 5, a limited pre-release series of five WAVES spotlighting watershed works of art in debt to their context.