Peter Macdiarmid/Getty ImagesDamien Hirst’s ‘The Kingdom’, featuring a tiger shark in formaldehyde, on display at Sotheby’s in London in 2008.
LONDON — Don’t know much about art, but you know what you like? Well, what do you think of Damien Hirst, he of the pickled shark and diamond-encrusted skull?The 46-year-old Briton is reputedly the country’s richest artist after making a fortune of around $300 million since breaking into the international art scene in the early 1990s as the most prominent of the Young British Artists movement.
His erstwhile patron, Charles Saatchi, has called him a genius and placed him up there with the Americans Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol and Donald Judd as one of a handful of contemporary artists whose reputations will endure.
But as London’s Tate Modern gallery prepares to launch the artist’s first British retrospective next week to coincide with the city’s hosting of the Olympic Games, one critic has ruffled art world feathers by advising investors in Mr. Hirst’s work to get out while they can.
“His works may draw huge crowds when they go on show in a five-month-long blockbuster retrospective at Tate Modern next week,” Julian Spalding wrote in Britain’s The Independent. “But they have no artistic content and are worthless as works of art. They are, therefore, worthless financially.”
He said collectors such as Steve Cohen, the Wall Street hedge fund billionaire who was said to have paid $12 million for Hirst’s “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” in 2005, could end up with something no more valuable than a shark in a tank.
“I’ve coined the term Con Art,” said Mr. Spalding, “short for contemporary conceptual art and for art that cons people.” He is so incensed that he’s written a book on the subject — “Con Art — Why you ought to sell your Damien Hirsts while you can” — to be published this weekend.
Hirst’s fans naturally demur. “Hirst’s work asks viewers to question the main dilemmas of human existence: birth, illness, death and religion,” according to the Tate Modern’s blurb, perhaps unwittingly reinforcing the thought that art should be seen and not heard.
And no one would begrudge Mr. Hirst his wealth. In an interview to be broadcast next week by Channel 4 television, Mr. Hirst recalls growing up poor in the northern city of Leeds. “When I was a kid we had so little money I remember looking for money on the street,” he says.
Oliver Basciano, a critic writing for Channel 4 News, castigated Mr. Spalding for conflating art and money. “His first key gripe seems to be that he thinks that Hirst’s work is likely to depreciate in financial value and the Tate needs to offload it quick.
“Now I have no idea whether it will or not — I’m no market monitor — but the idea that a public gallery should be building their collection with an eye to its market worth is beyond troublesome.”
Buyers, in any case, appear undeterred. A doodle of a dead shark that Mr. Hirst rapidly sketched as a tip for a cab driver fetched the equivalent of $7,500 at auction in London this week, 13 times the pre-auction estimate.
Perhaps I should declare a personal interest. Mr. Hirst gave a similar shark doodle to my son, Joe, a struggling painter and Hirst admirer who once met the maestro at a private view. Keep it safe, Joe.