It was originally commissioned in 1991 by Charles Saatchi, who sold it in 2004 to Steven A. Cohen for an undisclosed amount, widely reported to have been at least $8 million.

However, the title of Don Thompson's book, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art, suggests a higher figure.

[3] The work was funded by the businessman Charles Saatchi, who in 1991 had offered to pay for whatever artwork Hirst wanted to create.

[5] Hirst asked Doris Lockhart for a loan to cover the cost of shipping the shark from Australia, but she gave him the required amount.

[7] The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living was first exhibited in 1992 in the first of a series of Young British Artists shows at the Saatchi Gallery, then at its premises in St John's Wood, north London.

"[9] The New York Times in 2007 gave the following description of the artwork: Mr. Hirst often aims to fry the mind (and misses more than he hits), but he does so by setting up direct, often visceral experiences, of which the shark remains the most outstanding.

In keeping with the piece's title, the shark is simultaneously life and death incarnate in a way you don't quite grasp until you see it, suspended and silent, in its tank.

[8] In 2006, Oliver Crimmen, a scientist and fish curator at London's Natural History Museum, assisted with the preservation of the new specimen.

Without naming the artwork or the artist, he stated that brush marks in the lace collar of a painting by Velázquez could be more radical than a shark "murkily disintegrating in its tank on the other side of the Thames".

[25] The 2009 British-Hungarian film The Nutcracker in 3D features a scene in which a pet shark is electrocuted in a water tank, which director Andrei Konchalovsky cites as a reference to Hirst's artwork.