Plenty of flies on this art

Scoff, but I guarantee it would be one of the most attention grabbing exhibits of the show:

Damien Hirst's latest installation, on display at London's Royal Academy of Arts, may be his most skin-crawling to date.

Let's Eat Outdoors Today features a perspex box in which thousands of flies plague an abandoned barbecue. The piece is divided in two with one side featuring maggots lying in trays on a barbecue while they slowly develop in to flies.

In the other side, linked to the first by a small hole, four perspex chairs sit around a table laid for a roast chicken meal complete with beer and wine.

Ominously for the thousands of inhabitants of the sculpture, there is also a large fly-zapping machine that electrocutes them if they make contact…

Let's Eat Outdoors Today is follows on from Hirst's previous work A Thousand Years. This featured maggots hatching into flies that feed on a severed cow's head. The insects are then fried by another fly-killer.

It's sensation rather than explanation, thrill rather than insight, exploitation rather than elevation. But if people watch....

(Thanks to reader Albert.)