Hirst has trouble selling his £200m skull

Damien Hirst (pictured) may have made £111m last month in a sale of his works at Sotheby's, but not even he is protected from the financial crisis, it seems. The 43-year-old artist is having enormous difficulty finding someone to stump up for his famous diamond encrusted skull, which was put up for sale last year with a price tag of £50m.

He had hoped to offload the work, called For the Love of God, when it was originally exhibited at Jay Jopling's White Cube gallery in 2007, but there have been no takers. So, in an attempt to shift it, it is now going to tour the world, beginning at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam on November 1. And if that little marketing exercise yields no results, Hirst says he will put it up for auction.

In an interview with the French newspaper, Le Figaro, Hirst said: "I sold two-thirds [of the diamond skull] to an investment company, I kept one-third... We have an agreement. If they can't sell it privately, within eight years, it will go to auction."

In a separate interview published last month, Hirst's business manager Frank Dunphy admitted to Time magazine that he and Jay Jopling were the co-investors in the work, which is said to have cost £15m to make. However, Dunphy remains bullish, claiming it is now worth £200m. Some, however, have joked that Hirst, Jopling and Dunphy will most likely now be reduced to picking out the diamonds and selling them on as a job lot to H. Samuel. ·