In June 2007, British Conceptual Artist Damien Hirst, who was recently ranked as the most powerful individual in the contemporary art world by Art Review magazine, unveiled his creation, For The Love of God , a dazzling piece consisting of the life-sized platinum cast of an actual human skull completely covered with 8,601 pave-set diamonds estimated to be worth as much as $30 Million. In the middle of the forehead is a large, pink diamond weighing 52.4 carats and said to be worth 4 million pounds alone.

The title of the piece comes from Hirst's mother who asked her son, “For the love of God, what are you going to do next?” The piece was put on display at London's White Cube Gallery with a price tag of £50 Million (about $100 Million), and sold for the full price ten weeks later to a group of investors which included the White Cube Gallery and Hirst himself. Part of the deal was that the buyers would display the work in major galleries for the following two years. Although Hirst's share was reportedly 24%, the total price of the sale made it the most expensive piece of art ever sold by a living artist.

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.

Damien Hirst's For The Love of God follows the tradition of the "memento mori", a widely varied historic genre of artistic expression which admonishes the viewer about the fleeting nature of human life and the inevitability and finality of death. In Hirst's rendering of the theme, the diamond-encrusted head seems to be mocking the viewer and the world at large for placing such high value on the materials from which it is made. The piece is striking and eerily beautiful, but the beauty is the cold and soulless beauty of materialism.

Conspicuously absent is any suggestion of love, life, spirituality or humanity. Thus it can and probably should be seen primarily as a comment on the decline of  human and perhaps artistic values that can result from too much emphasis on materialsm. Some have even suggested that it points an accusing finger at the diamond industry for human rights abuses that have come to light in recent years, and others go so far as to see in it a self-parody and a thinly-veiled indictment of capitalism in general.