Animal rights activists vs. Daniel Hirst: It's not right to let flies die for a work of art

Is it right to let thousands of flies die for awork of art? According to activists from PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), an animal welfare association that operates worldwide, the answer is no, and so they have pointed the finger at a very famous work by Damien Hirst, on display at an exhibition at the Kunstmuseum in Wolfsburg, Germany, denounced by the association. The work, A Thousand Years, is one of Hirst’s best-known works (a specimen can also be found at the Fondazione Prada in Milan): made in 1990, it is a large glass case containing an incubator of fly larvae, which feed on the fake blood gushing from a cow’s head (it is actually colored water mixed with sugar), and then die electrocuted by an anti-insect lamp. It is, in short, a depiction of a life cycle, from birth to death, making use of fly larvae commonly sold for fishing.

The work had been on display at the exhibition Power! Light!, which closed last July 10-the affair came to a head just days before the closing, with PETA suing the museum and the city’s veterinary office forwarding a report to the institute (by which time, however, the work had already been removed). “We thought the flies were not covered by the Animal Welfare Act,” the museum’s director, Andreas Beitin, told the Braunschweiger Zeitung newspaper. In fact, there is a law in Germany, the Tierschutzgesetz (literally, in fact, “Animal Welfare Act”), enacted in 2006 and updated in 2021, which also lays down regulations on the killing of animals (although it does not refer to invertebrates anyway).

However according to Peta activist Peter Höffken, “Killing animals has nothing to do with art, it just shows the arrogance of people who will literally stop at nothing for their own interests.” The museum’s CEO, Otmar Böhmer, said he shared PETA’s view that animals are not meant to entertain us or be exploited, and expressed willingness to have the museum contact the artist and his studio to see if the installation could be modified to make use of artificial flies.

Pictured is Damien Hirst’s A Thousand Years (1990).

Animal rights activists vs. Daniel Hirst: It's not right to let flies die for a work of art

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