“Diamonds never lie” Shirley Bassey sang in the open­ing track of 71’s James Bond movie “Diamonds are forever”. Dia­monds - ulti­mate symbol of class, eter­nity and truth. It is this notion of truth which Bel­gian Dia­mond trade monop­o­list de Beers is pro­mot­ing as the essence of the nat­ural dia­monds they are mining in Africa. Their busi­ness is increas­ingly endan­gered by man­u­fac­tured gems. In the words of Jef Van Royen, offi­cial rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the dia­mond indus­try in Bel­gium:

“If people really love each other, then they give each other the real stone,” he says, during an inter­view at coun­cil head­quar­ters on the Hov­e­niersstraat in Antwerp. “It is not a symbol of eter­nal love if it is some­thing that was cre­ated last week.” (from “The New Dia­mond Age”, an amaz­ing arti­cle in Wired mag)

Damien Hirst’s work “For the Love of God” isn’t that much about truth and eter­nity, but rather wealth and power. It is sup­posed to be the most expen­sive art­work in the world: “For the Love of God” is a skull cast in plat­inum encased with 8500 dia­monds. Damien says:

“I just want to cel­e­brate life by saying, to hell with death. What better way of saying that by taking the ulti­mate symbol of death and cov­er­ing it in the ulti­mate symbol of luxury, desire and decadence?”

De Beers con­tacted Vik Muniz, what he’d do with 10 Mil­lion Dia­monds. His answer: “I thought doing some­thing gross or dis­gust­ing would be too obvi­ous, so I did some­thing very glam­orous. The idea is that people would buy it as a social expe­ri­ence, since having pic­tures of dia­monds gives people the impres­sion of having dia­monds themselves.” So look at the above images again - do you feel it? I think it is quite the oppo­site - the glam of female movie stars mul­ti­plied with the glitz of dia­monds results rather in desire than the sat­is­fac­tion of ownership.

And finally the next layer of fal­si­fi­ca­tion and abstrac­tion - images of dia­monds which never existed, and the reason why I researched dia­mond imagery. Darrel and me have been search­ing for the right visual lan­guage for the a101 project at my office. As the project is ulti­mately about money and power, we wanted an urban plan made of diamonds.

Update: I’ve found some images and a making-​of of Damien Hirst’s Dia­mond skull:

see supertouchblog’s making of and greg’s post on the skull’s cost­ing and the full flickr photo set.