"Death is such a heavy subject, it would be good to make something that laughed in the face of it."

Says Damien Hirst, who seems to be laughing the hardest, as he sells a diamond-encrusted skull for $100 million.

The dazzle of the diamonds might outshine any meaning Hirst attaches to it, and that could be a problem. Its value as jewelry alone is preposterous. Hirst, who financed the piece himself, watched for months as the price of international diamonds rose while the Bond Street gem dealer Bentley & Skinner tried to corner the market for the artist’s benefit. Given the ongoing controversy over blood diamonds from Africa, “For the Love of God” now has the potential to be about death in a more literal way.

I found a way to laugh at death through art and commerce, and then, in the middle of the project, I saw I had connected myself to the production of death in the real world.

“That’s when you stop laughing,” Hirst says. “You might have created something that people might die because of. I guess I felt like Oppenheimer or something. What have I done? Because it’s going to need high security all its life.”

Is something wrong with the contents of this man's skull? How do you explain that last sentence?! He has the decency to ask "What have I done?" but what should be the answer to the question -- it begins with "because" -- completely changes the subject to the collector's problem of securing the ultra-expensive object from theft.