A woman living in Palm Beach, Florida, hit a $3 million sculpture by Damien Hirst after driving her Rolls-Royce into the backyard of collector and Museum of Modern Art administrator Steven Tananbaum and his wife Lisa.
In late March, an unnamed 66-year-old woman drove her Rolls-Royce sedan into a backyard on Canterbury Lane, Palm Beach, where it hit a sculpture the owner told the Palm Beach Daily News was worth $3 million. Footage shared by Palm Beach Police shows what appears to be Hirst’s Sphinx (2017) grew from its base in the Tananbaums’ garden. The sculpture was part of a Hirst’s Treasures from the Wreck of the Incredible exhibition presented during the Venice Biennale 2017.
by Damien Hirst Sphinx (2017) on the Tananbaum property following the collision Courtesy of Palm Beach Police Department
Sphinx and other works included in the exhibition were created to look like sculptures that had been salvaged from an abandoned wreck and were still covered with corals, barnacles, sea urchins and other species of ocean flora and fauna. It marked Hirst’s first big show in nearly a decade and was widely seen as a comeback. Hirst also created a mockumentary for the spectacle that gave the pieces a fictional backstory of being abandoned to the bottom of a sea after the boat carrying the artwork sank off the coast of East Africa.
After the car hit Sphinxthe woman continued to drive her luxury vehicle through the Tananbaums’ backyard and over a seawall, falling onto the beach that borders the property, police said at Palm Beach Daily News. When police found the car, the vehicle was hanging from the seawall with one end touching the beach sand, according to a police report.
The Rolls-Royce, an unnamed Florida resident, drove over the seawall at the Tananbaum property in Palm Beach, Florida Courtesy of Palm Beach Police Department
The woman could not remember the hours before the accident and did not appear to be intoxicated, police said at the Palm Beach Daily News. Representatives for the Tananbaums did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Tananbaums are great collectors of contemporary and post-war art. In 2019 Steven faces calls to resign as a trustee of MoMA on the links between GoldenTree Asset Management, the hedge fund he co-founded, and Puerto Rico’s financial crisis. In 2019, GoldenTree held at least $2.5 billion of Puerto Rico’s debt.
“People died after Hurricane Maria and [Tananbaum] did not hesitate to take advantage of the disaster. If MoMA cares about the welfare of other humans more than money, it needs to act,” said Gina De Jesus, organizer of New York Communities for Change, in 2019.
In early 2020, after two years of legal battles, Tananbaum settled a lawsuit with dealer Larry Gagosian and his eponymous gallery after claiming the dealer never delivered his purchase of three Jeff Koons sculptures for which he collectively had paid $13 million.
