I first saw Damien Hirst’s cabinets ten years ago, in London, at Barmacy on a Friday night.  They were the perfect, kitschy and ridiculous background to the happy energy in the lounge. 

Seeing them again, this time at L&M Gallery on East 78th Street, they seemed awfully sinister.  The cabinets are constructed with unnerving precision, and the generically-labeled medicines and supplies inside are arrayed with a devastating, lifeless elegance.  There are half-gallon-size jars of codeine and sudafed, and boxes and boxes of prescription painkillers.  These are the things that keep us healthy. 

(Damien Hirst, The Existence of Nothing Causes Nothing, 1999.)