July 13 (Bloomberg) -- Visitors to New York's Metropolitan Museum soon will be able to see one of contemporary culture's most startling artworks, Damien Hirst's 13-foot tiger shark suspended in a tank of formaldehyde.

Its owner, hedge-fund manager and art collector Steven A. Cohen, has loaned the work for three years. The 22-ton piece will be on view in the second-floor Lila Acheson Wallace Gallery by Aug. 29, the museum announced late yesterday. Cohen's spokesman, Jonathan Gasthalter, declined to comment.

The 1991 work, whose full title is ``The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living,'' was bought by Cohen for $8 million in 2005. The original shark was disintegrating at the time of the sale, and the artist had it replaced.

Hirst's shark -- as it is familiarly known to the art- loving public -- is the most prominent work created by the young British artists of the 1990s. It was originally bought by the collector Charles Saatchi for 50,000 pounds ($101,000), a sum that caused a sensation at the time (though it now shows the inflation that contemporary art prices have undergone in the interim).

Right from the start, Hirst's shark caused conservation problems. Unlike the other preserved wildlife in the artist's sculptural tableaux -- which now include large quantities of sheep, cows, pigs and other fauna -- the shark wasn't at first properly injected with formaldehyde. As a result, it deteriorated rapidly.

Fresh Fish

It was already looking distinctly the worse for wear when it was displayed as the principal work in the ``Sensation'' exhibition at London's Royal Academy in 1997. After its sale to Cohen, Hirst offered to restore the work by inserting an entirely fresh creature -- this time thoroughly pickled in preservative.

He thus posed a neat problem to those who agonize over the philosophy of art. Was the essence of Hirst's work a particular shark, or was it the idea of putting a predatory marine carnivore in a tank and calling it modern art? (Personally, my feeling is that Hirst is correct and the answer is the latter.)

At any rate, visitors to the Met will have the opportunity to inspect a fresh fish. They also will be able to marvel at the spectacle of a contemporary artist, still in early middle age, whose works now command higher prices than those of Raphael and Velazquez.

The asking price for Hirst's most recent high-profile offering, ``For the Love of God,'' a platinum cast of a skull encrusted with diamonds, was 50 million pounds. (Admittedly, 12 million pounds of that went to labor and raw materials.) At a recent auction in London, a Velazquez went for a mere 8.4 million pounds and a Raphael for 18 million pounds.

``It should be especially revealing and stimulating to confront this work in the context of the entire history of art,'' Metropolitan Museum Director Philippe de Montebello said in a statement. He probably didn't have relative prices in mind, but they do make you think.

(Martin Gayford is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this story: Martin Gayford in London at martin@cgayford.freeserve.co.uk.

Last Updated: July 13, 2007 00:05 EDT