BRITAIN: Performance Artist & Author Sebastian Horsley Dies Of Overdose

Notorious performance artist, model, and author Sebastian Horsley has been found dead of a heroin overdose in his London home.

Sebastian Horsley, the dandy, writer and artist who found fame by being nailed to a cross in the Philippines, has died at the age of 47. The colourful self-publicist was found dead at his flat in central London this morning, days after a play adapted from his memoirs – Dandy in the Underworld – opened at the Soho theatre. A spokesman for the Metropolitan police said the cause of death was unexplained but reports suggested Horsley died from a heroin overdose. In 2002 the artist traveled to the Philippines "to see what it was like" to be nailed to a cross before he embarked on a painting of the Crucifixion. The foot support on his cross gave way after he had been nailed to the wood, prompting him to remark later: "I have been punished by a God I don't believe in and he has thrown me off the cross for impersonating his son, for being an atheist, and for being a disaster. I have made a complete fool of myself." He wrote in the Observer of his fondness for having sex with prostitutes. "Prostitution is obscene, debasing and disgraceful," he concluded. "The point is, so am I."

Horsley was recently denied entrance to the United States based on a prior drug conviction. A quote from his memoir: "You may look back on your life and accept it as good or evil. But it is far, far harder to admit that you have been completely unimportant; that in the great sum of things all a man's endless grapplings are no more significant than the scuttlings of a cockroach. The universe is neither friendly nor hostile. It is merely indifferent. This makes me ecstatic."