Damien Hirst's reputation on the line

WILL Damien Hirst's reputation stand up in the new age of austerity? The controversial artist’s work over the past 20 years will be showcased at a major Tate Modern exhibition next year, bringing together more than 70 pieces including signature sculptures such as his 1991 shark suspended in formaldehyde and his 2007 pickled cow and calf.

But objects like his notorious £50m diamond-encrusted skull may look out of place in the current economic climate, argues The Guardian's chief arts writer Charlotte Higgins.

Hirst, now 46, is inextricably linked with "the vagaries of the art market", she says. The diamond skull "will surely look very different in the uncertain London of 2012 compared with its sensational appearance in buoyant 2007". The following year an auction of Hirst's work at Sotheby's raised £111 million. Lehman Brothers collapsed the next day, triggering a global recession.

But Higgins argues the retrospective – Hirst’s first solo exhibition in a British museum – will "allow visitors to set aside the hype and judge the works on their own terms".

The Evening Standard's art critic Brian Sewell, writing in The Independent, argues that the Tate should not be honouring Hirst, enfant terrible of the 1990s 'Young British Artists' movement, with a retrospective at all. "Hirst is so familiar no one needs to see another work to see what kind of artist he is. If you have seen one spot painting you have seen them all."

Hirst was important for shaking up "a dreary and complacent" art scene in the late 1980s, counters The Independent's art critic Michael Glover. "What we must remember is that until Hirst and the YBAs began to make an impact, British art had almost forgotten what it was to shock … Art is about the beautiful. It is also about the nasty, the unpalatable."
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