Art in the interior: hotel room designed by Damien Hirst

The most expensive hotel room in the world costs $ 100.000 per day and occupies the 40th floor of the Palms Casino Resort hotel in Las Vegas. The suite was designed by the iconic British artist Damien Hirst, who called the project "Empathy Suite" and filled it with his own works. The total cost of the work is $ 10 million. This deposit is taken from the guests.

At the entrance, guests are welcomed by Hirst famous sharks preserved in formaldehyde, and the skeleton of marlin is placed the bar counter. The pill cabinets are filled with diamonds and the chairs are painted with butterflies. But "Empathy Suite" is not just full of works by Hirst – this is the very work by Hirst. The guest seems to penetrate the artist's brain, or at least try on his personality. All the dilemmas accompanying the artist of such magnitude - life and death, art and money, excesses and moderation, skill and luck – are presented here as vividly as never before.

Magnates Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta announced plans to buy Palms Casino Resort in 2016 and has spent $ 690 million on the reconstruction of the hotel. They decided to create a place where art is not a decorative element or a lure for tourists, but actually an integral part of the space. At that time, the brothers have been collecting Hirst works for more than ten years, and working on the hotel, contacted the artist to buy some of his works. Hirst offered them "The Unknown (Explored, Explained, Exploded)" (1999) – a work of the same series as the irrefutable masterpiece of the artist "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living" (1991). The huge shark carcass, divided into three parts and sorted into three glass containers, became the main element of the bar Unknown, designed by Hearst in full, on the first floor of the hotel. The fact that brothers Fertitta took the work of the artist, which for the general public embodies the quirks and banality of the art market and placed it at the bar in the casino, is in its own way interesting. Where, if not here, you get everything by a fluke, and lose it in an instant, unsuccessfully throwing the dice.

"The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living" was conceived as a provocation, and when Charles Saatchi bought it for £ 50.000, the British tabloids caustically heralded: "£50.000 for fish without chips." But £ 50.000 was nothing. In 2004, the sculpture was sold to the king, the American collector Stephen Cohen for a fortune and gave the name of Don Thompson's book about the art market in the XIX century, "The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art".

The two-level "Empathy Suite" was designed in conjunction with the architectural firm Bentel & Bentel, located in New York. There are two bedrooms, three bathrooms, massage rooms, as well as an outdoor jacuzzi within the area of 836 square meters – it offers a panoramic view of Las Vegas. In addition, the room has a bar for 13 people, and the Suite can accommodate up to 52 people all together. Colourful circles, framing the jacuzzi and running on columns, butterflies fluttering on the furniture, skulls, carved in the wall of the pool, neatly laid out tablets and pills – it takes infinitely long to consider the room in full detail, but the maximum effect is achieved when all the motives of the artist are collected together.

Both spaces – the bar and the hotel room - are the examples of the unique synergy between the works of art and the environment which they interact with. Whatever the artist's intentions are, the "Empathy Suite" is an ideal offer for Sin City. Modern art is not put on a pedestal here, but turned into an expensive hotel room for wealthy tourists, reckless in their spending – the ideal clientele. The interior can be called horrible and tasteless, kitschy and provocative, but it's Hirst and it's Vegas.