"Gone but not Forgotten" by Damien Hirst. The golden skeleton of a mammoth that sits in the courtyards at the Faena Miami Beach Hotel

In the main courtyard of the Faena Hotel in Miami Beach stands a golden mammoth skeleton inside a massive glass case. The piece is Damien Hirst’s Gone But Not Forgotten, installed in 2014, and over the years it has quietly become one of the most photographed works of art in the city.

At first it feels simple enough. A mammoth skeleton, plated in gold, placed inside a monumental vitrine. People walk by, take a photo, maybe circle around it once before heading toward dinner or the beach. But the longer you look at it, the more the piece begins to reveal the kind of ideas Hirst has been exploring for years.

What I find interesting about the mammoth is that, in its own way, it still feels like one of Hirst’s tanks. For years his work placed animals inside glass vitrines filled with formaldehyde. Sharks, sheep, cows. Suspended in a clinical stillness that felt part laboratory and part spectacle. Those pieces were unsettling not only because of what they showed, but because of how they showed it. Life reduced to a specimen, carefully contained, something to observe rather than something that once moved.

The mammoth at Faena echoes that language, even if the method is different. The skeleton stands inside a monumental glass case, immediately recalling those earlier works where the container itself was part of the idea. But here the preservation is not chemical. It is gold.

That shift changes the feeling of the piece completely. The bones have been plated and transformed into something luminous and almost ceremonial. The animal no longer feels like something being examined. It feels more like a relic, something ancient that has been elevated rather than studied.

Much of Hirst’s work circles the same questions about mortality, science, and our strange relationship with permanence. We build museums, collections, vitrines, all in an attempt to hold on to things that time has already claimed. The mammoth simply pushes that instinct a little further. Instead of preserving the animal in liquid, he elevates it, turning extinction into something almost precious.

Standing there in the courtyard of the Faena Hotel, the piece carries that tension easily. It feels both ancient and theatrical at the same time. It carries the quiet weight of something that disappeared thousands of years ago, yet it also reflects Miami’s particular love for spectacle. In that sense, the mammoth fits the city perfectly, history preserved and polished, displayed somewhere between science, myth, and a little bit of showmanship.

People take the photo and keep walking. The mammoth doesn’t seem particularly impressed. It just stands there in gold, almost timeless, quietly holding its place in the courtyard. Unlike the kind of conceptual art that tries to provoke or unsettle, this one doesn’t demand anything from you. It simply exists there, somewhere between history, myth, and the rhythm of Miami Beach.

"Gone but not forgotten" by Damien Hirst || Photo by Nadia Bouzid

Title: “Gone but not Forgotten”

(2014)

Artist: Damien Hirst

📍Location: Faena Hotel -Miami Beach, FL

Faena Hotel's Beach Parasol [ Design] | photo by Nadia Bouzid