The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

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.

Corporate buyers are looking to complete their space in an interesting way. They also select paintings, photography and sculptures for their employees’ enjoyment and to project a certain image. Some view their art as an extension of their corporate work life. I enjoy the challenge of coming up with a plan that reflects what a client wants to say about itself.

I’ve been an art adviser to corporations, law firms, developers, trade associations and other organizations for 36 years. Much of my work comes from referrals. I’m often contacted by a managing partner of a law firm or a C.E.O. or firm administrator. If, after interviewing me, a group goes ahead with the project, it forms an art committee to work with me.

Every project is different, depending on the client’s goals. One company wanted to emphasize that it’s a global organization. I suggested a series of antique textiles — tapestries, paisley shawls, 18th-century English bed coverings, Indian embroideries, batiks, costumes and ethnographic artwork — from locations around the globe where the company has offices. We were surprised to learn that one of the shawls was a rare textile that experts believed had been lost. The client became so involved in the company’s collection that he was asked to join the board of the Textile Museum in Washington.

I’ve found that much exciting work today involves merging art and technology. Artists are using computer-generated images, LED lighting, video and other technology, and it’s attracting interest from companies.

Some organizations aren’t sure what they want when we start together. At a law firm I worked with, I learned that many partners had engineering backgrounds. I suggested devoting a portion of the collection to works of art in glass, either blown or cast in molds. I thought the glass-making process would interest people with that type of background.

People have different tastes, so the committees I work with often make trade-offs. When I propose artwork, I present electronic images from the artists or galleries, for example. If two or three people agree and a fourth is reluctant, that person might give in and say that she’ll get what she likes another time. A committee that’s too large doesn’t work well together, and one outspoken member can make the process uncomfortable for the others.

Organizations learn that selecting art is a process. Many groups that are compiling a collection buy artwork over time, as they can afford it. We come up with a master plan according to the budget. Currently, I’m curating a series of rotating exhibits that change four times a year. The organization’s goal is to encourage local artists, and the work of one or two artists is included at a time.

Once art is installed, I often give clients and their employees a tour of their acquisitions. I discuss the art’s context, including the period when it was made, and tell them about the artist. I go over this with the art committee when the art is selected, but everyone else gets to hear this introduction. Employees who understand why the art was selected are more likely to enjoy it.

Organizations that buy art are investing in themselves — and in more than a monetary sense. Art speaks to culture, self-expression and creativity. Corporations appreciate the reasons for art in the workplace more than they did when I started my company, and developers and architects know to consider art at the beginning of a project so it can be visually integrated into the setting.

WHEN organizations buy artwork, they are supporting the arts. That can mean buying from local artists, but it extends beyond that. Art touches lives. One client, a developer, had a perfect opportunity to do this. His Terrell Place project, formerly a department store, was a site of protest against racial segregation in the 1950s.We decided to reflect this event in the building and asked Elizabeth Catlett, a distinguished black artist, to create three large bronze sculptures for the lobby. To accompany them, we chose murals that illustrate the concepts of liberty and equality.

People who view the art and know the building’s history have told me that the artwork has brought them to tears.

As told to Patricia R. Olsen.

 

Adam Lewis, who wrote a biography of Mr. Hadley, confirmed the death. Mr. Hadley, who was born in Tennessee, died of cancer at the home of his sister, Elizabeth Hadley, his only survivor. He had homes in Manhattan and in Southport, Conn.

Both independently and as a partner with the prominent interior designer Sister Parish, Mr. Hadley created residences for an illustrious roster of clients with resonant family names like Astor, Grunwald, Paley, Rockefeller, Bronfman, Getty, Whitney and Mellon, not to mention Al and Tipper Gore and Mike Nichols and Diane Sawyer.

His taste was relatively spare and modernist, but he was willing to mix ideas, drawing on a deep knowledge of design history. And reflecting his own moderate temperament, he had a keen sense of how much was too much and how much was not enough.

He and Mrs. Parish, whose work was more English in style, worked together as the firm Parish-Hadley for 33 years, creating interiors that were always beautiful, sometimes lush but never overstuffed.

“Never less, never more,” Mr. Hadley was fond of saying of a well-realized interior. “Glamour is part of it,” he added in a 2004 interview in New York magazine. “But glamour is not the essence. Design is about discipline and reality, not about fantasy beyond reality.”

Perhaps his most celebrated work was the library at the Park Avenue home of Brooke Astor. He transformed a high-ceilinged faux-French drawing room into a strikingly elegant space with red-lacquered shelves and brass trim befitting a client who had given considerable philanthropic support to libraries, especially the New York Public Library.

One early project was for the Park Avenue apartment of Edgar Bronfman, the chairman of Seagram, and his wife, Ann Loeb. They wanted more modern quarters with a good deal of open space, so Mr. Hadley demolished a drawing room wall, replaced it with glass and installed a travertine staircase. It was a contemporary space forged from a traditional one. Mrs. Parish then filled it with 18th-century furniture.

“The chairs became like sculptures,” Mr. Hadley recalled, “and it was fantastic.”

Albert Livingston Hadley Jr. was born in Springfield, Tenn., north of Nashville, on Nov. 18, 1920. His father owned a farm implement business, and the family moved often, giving his mother, Elizabeth, the opportunity to decorate several houses and young Albert to develop an interest in it himself.

As a child, Mr. Hadley studied fashion and design magazines and was enthralled by the movies, and by the time he was 13 he had already determined that his future lay in New York. Later in life he said he continued to prefer black-and-white movies because they let him supply all the color.

After high school and two years of college in Nashville, Mr. Hadley approached A. Herbert Rogers, a prominent local decorator, for a job as a junior assistant. Hired, he gained entry to many of Nashville’s finest houses and began his career as an expert on high residential style.

He was drafted into the Army in 1942 and served as a company payroll clerk in Chelmsford, England. With the help of the G.I. Bill, he was able to make the long-awaited move to New York in 1947, to attend the Parsons School of Design. There he caught the attention of Van Day Truex, the president of the school and an avatar of the urbanity and sleek good manners of postwar design. (He was later design director at Tiffany & Company.) Recognizing his abilities, Mr. Truex offered Mr. Hadley a teaching job shortly after his graduation in 1949.

In 1956, Mr. Hadley went to work for Eleanor Brown at McMillen, then the most prestigious decorating firm in the country. As he recalled for Mr. Lewis, the author of “Albert Hadley: The Story of America’s Preeminent Interior Designer” (2005), Mrs. Brown’s establishment was graciously strict. Hours were 9 to 5, with no Saturday or Sunday work allowed. Every afternoon a maid pushed a mahogany cart of tea and cookies from office to office, and Mrs. Brown would visit with her decorators, discussing their work and, by example, instilling the social finesse required to be in the business.

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Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.