Woman Crashes Her Rolls Royce Into a $3 Million Damien Hirst Sculpture
A Damien Hirst sculpture was damaged after a Rolls Royce crashed into the Florida property of billionaire hedge fund investor Steven Tananbaum.
On the evening of March 31, Elizabeth Raese, 66, drove through Tananbaum’s garden and struck a sculpture installed in his yard, according to an incident report from the Palm Beach Police Department.
Surveillance footage of the incident showed that Raese also crashed through a landscape fence and seawall on the property, located at 102 Canterbury Lane, before coming to a rest on the nearby beach.
The damaged sculpture in question is Hirst’s Sphinx, as first reported by Artnet yesterday (April 11). The work was shown during his Treasures From the Wreck of the Unbelievable show at the 2017 Venice Biennale, an exhibition of shipwreck-themed sculptures.
The sculpture is valued at $3 million, according to the Palm Beach Police Department’s report, which noted that Tananbaum’s wife Lisa stated she “would need an expert to assess the damage further.”
A prominent art world family
The incident also caused $10,000 in damages to Tananbaum’s seawall, $100 in damages to their driveway and landscape fence, and only $2,000 in damages to Raese’s 2018 Rolls Royce.
Raese showed no visible signs of intoxication when authorities were called to the property, according to the Palm Beach Police Department, but said she was unable to recall the past few hours and was taken to a hospital.
The Tananbaums purchased the Palm Beach property in 2011 for $26.4 million, according to property records. It was previously owned by Izzy Asper, the late founder of Canadian media company Canwest Global Communications Corp.
Tananbaum is the founder and chief investment officer of GoldenTree Asset Management, which currently oversees approximately $49 billion in assets.
Tananbaum and his wife, Lisa, are prominent art collectors and the couple have made various donations to art institutions including New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum.
In 2017, the Tananbaums donated $1 million to Northwestern University’s Block Museum of Art in order to establish the Steven and Lisa Munster Tananbaum Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art position.
Tananbaum is also a trustee at the Museum of Modern Art, a position which led to protests from activists and local politicians in 2019 over GoldenTree Asset Management owning more than $2.5 billion of Puerto Rico’s debt. And in 2018, Tananbaum sued Gagosian Gallery for allegedly failing to deliver three sculptures by Jeff Koons which he purchased for $13 million. The case was later settled in 2020.