5. Damien Hirst, Aby Rosen, And The Case Of “The Virgin Mother” 2014
Aby Rosen, the real estate titan and art collector who collects Warhol and Hirst among others, notoriously pissed off his suburban neighbours by erecting a 13-ton, 33-foot-high painted bronze sculpture by Damien Hirst which he placed on his 5.5-acre estate. Residents of wealthy Old Westbury, New York, were thoroughly dismayed that their millionaire neighbour plopped the 33-foot, painted bronze sculpture of a ‘beyond-naked’ pregnant woman with an exposed foetus on his front lawn. So when Rosen installed this Hirstian monstrosity on his newly renovated property his neighbours were roused into action. “It is out of character with the neighbourhood,” the village’s mayor, Fred Carillo, has said in interviews, noting that it would be more appropriate outside a medical building devoted to obstetrics and gynaecology.