Since the late 1980s Damien Hirst has produced a body of work that has intensified critical debate around the nature of contemporary art. Hirst’s work is underpinned by an acute awareness of the dilemmas inherent in human existence: ‘I am aware of mental contradictions in everything, like: I am going to die and I want to live forever’. The Acquired Inability to Escape is a large steel and glass chamber that refers to the aesthetic of minimalism. However, its staging conveys a sense of human presence or narrative. It contains a table and chair, cigarettes, lighter, ashtray and stubs. For Hirst, the cigarette is a multi-layered symbol suggesting luxury, danger and death. Here, an addiction to smoking can be interpreted as a metaphor for decadence, a kind of bittersweet pleasure in hastening death.