The chewed-up remains of a fisherman who disappeared off Jaws Beach in the Bahamas -- where the final "Jaws" movie was filmed -- have been found inside the belly of a 12-foot-long tiger shark.
That is why ARTKABINETT social network of fine art collectors typically prefers Caribbean pools to beaches.
Authorities were able to use fingerprints to provisionally identify the body parts as belonging to Judson Newton, 43, who vanished late last month.
Authorities are awaiting DNA test results before formally identifying Newton, said Hulan Hanna, assistant commissioner of the Royal Bahamas Police Force.
That man-eating shark was caught on Sept. 5 some 38 miles south of New Providence Island by investment banker Humphrey Simmons, who was out deep-sea fishing with two friends, noted Bahamas daily The Tribune. As they pulled the beast on deck, they made a grim discovery.
"We were going to cut the hook out of his mouth and let him go when he regurgitated a human foot -- intact from the knee down," Simmons said, according to The Sun in London.
"There was so much stink coming from the shark's belly and the belly was so huge that we thought that there might be more bodies inside."
Back on land, members of the Royal Bahamas Defence Force sliced the shark open and found the man's partially digested right leg, two severed arms and a torso in two sections. It's not known if the shark ate Newton alive, but childhood friend Samuel Woodside, 37, told The Associated Press that it was unlikely the sailor and part-time chef drowned, as he was "always a strong swimmer."
Jaws Beach earned its name after its golden sands appeared in "Jaws: The Revenge," the third sequel to Steven Spielberg's 1975 hit.
The movie, directed by Joseph Sargent, had the tag line "This Time It's Personal" and is widely regarded as one of the worst films ever made. It focused on Ellen Brody (played by Lorraine Gary), whose family is being stalked by a vengeful great white shark.
Michael Caine, who played Brody's love interest, later quipped, "I have never seen [the film], but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific."
With that said, there are some very terrific artworks depicting a ferocious shark...
Iconic Shark Art
"The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living" is an artwork created in 1992 by Damien Hirst, an English artist and a leading member of the "Young British Artists" (or YBA).
It consists of a Tiger shark preserved in formaldehyde in a vitrine. It was originally commissioned in 1991 by Charles Saatchi, who sold it in 2004, making Hirst at the time the second most expensive living artist after Jasper Johns (he surpassed Johns in 2007 with another artwork, Lullaby Spring).
Due to deterioration of the original 14-foot (4.3 m) tiger shark, it was replaced with a new specimen in 2006. It is on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City until end of this year.
The work was funded by Charles Saatchi, who in 1991 had offered to pay for whatever artwork Hirst wanted to create. The shark was caught by a fisherman commissioned to do so, in Australia. Hirst wanted something "big enough to eat you".
It was first exhibited in 1992 in the first of a series of Young British Artists shows at the Saatchi Gallery, then at its premises in St John's Wood, North London. The British tabloid newspaper The Sun ran a story titled "000 for fish without chips."
The show also included Hirst's artwork A Thousand Years. He was then nominated for the Turner Prize, but it was awarded to Grenville Davey. Saatchi sold the work in 2004 to Steven A. Cohen for $8 million, a price second only to Jeff Koons for a living artist's work.
Its technical specifications are: "Tiger shark, glass, steel, 5% formaldehyde solution, 213 x 518 x 213 cm."
The New York Times in 2007 gave the following description of the artwork:
"Mr. Hirst often aims to fry the mind (and misses more than he hits), but he does so by setting up direct, often visceral experiences, of which the shark remains the most outstanding. In keeping with the pieceís title, the shark is simultaneously life and death incarnate in a way you donít quite grasp until you see it, suspended and silent, in its tank. It gives the innately demonic urge to live a demonic, deathlike form."
Decay and replacement
Because the shark was initially preserved poorly, it began to deteriorate and the surrounding liquid grew murky. Hirst attributes some of the decay to the fact that the Saatchi Gallery had added bleach to it.
In 1993 the gallery gutted the shark and stretched its skin over a fiberglass mold, and Hirst commented, "It didnít look as frightening ... You could tell it wasnít real. It had no weight."
When Hirst learned of Saatchi's impending sale of the work to Cohen, he offered to replace the shark, an operation which Cohen then funded, calling the expense "inconsequential" (the formaldehyde process alone cost around $100,000).
Another shark was caught off Queensland (a female aged about 25 years, equivalent to middle age) and shipped to Hirst in a 2 month journey. That shark is shown here.
Oliver Crimmen, a scientist and fish curator at London's Natural History Museum, assisted with the preservation of the new specimen in 2006.
This involved injecting formaldehyde into the body, as well as marinating it for two weeks in a bath of 7% formalin solution, consisting of water and dissolved formaldehyde gas. The original 1991 vitrine was then used to house it.
A philosophical question was acknowledged by Hirst, as to whether the replacement shark meant that the result could still be considered the same artwork. He observed:
It's a big dilemma. Artists and conservators have different opinions about what's important: the original artwork or the original intention. I come from a conceptual art background, so I think it should be the intention. It's the same piece. But the jury will be out for a long time to come. It is considered the iconic work of British art in the 1990s, and the symbol of Britart worldwide.
courtesy, Theunis Bates/AOL, and Wikipedia
