 The Stuckists suggested that Hirst may have got the idea for his work from Saunders' shop display.In a speech at the Royal Academy in 2004, art critic Robert Hughes used "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living" as a prime example of how the international art market at the time was a "cultural obscenity".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".