Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, Sotheby’s auction of Damien Hirst’s latest work, 223 lots in total, was an extraordinary event. Never before had a living artist dared to dispense with the services of his dealers and send his work straight to auction. Never before had a single batch of one artist’s studio production – created over a period of just two years – been expected to change hands for so much money. The upper estimate for the first 56 lots alone was £62,370,000.

 

But Sotheby’s certainly had a lot at stake. The auctioneers had cleared all twelve of their galleries in New Bond Street to make room for a carnivalesque display of the artist’s trademark works. There were copious quantities of vitrines containing dead animals, alongside enough medicine cabinets to fill a pharmacy and numerous glass cases stocked with sundry arrangements of industrial diamonds, crumpled cigarette butts and plastic anatomical models. The walls were hung with myriad spin and spot paintings, as well as scores of canvases decorated with dead butterflies. This was some statement of confidence in the resilience of the market for Hirst’s work – and, by implication, the contemporary art market as a whole. If the sale were to be a flop, shares in the auction house would tumble.

 

The salesroom was so packed that every seat was taken and latecomers had to stand. It was like a tube train at rush hour, but with all the passengers wearing Gucci and Prada. Banks of telephones to the auctioneer’s left and right were manned by sharply dressed men and women acting on behalf of absentee bidders. Television screens all over the room displayed the lot to be sold and the current level of bidding. The figures were given simultaneously in different currencies including Hong Kong dollars and roubels – testimony to the globalisation of the modern art market.

 

After a fifteen-minute delay caused by general scrummaging for position, the auctioneer, a self-assured young man called Ollie Barker, invited bids for the first lot. This was a triptych of spin paintings in dayglo colours, sprinkled with butterflies, entitled Heaven Can Wait. The estimate was £300,000 - £500,000 but the bidding soon went higher and Mr Barker’s gavel came down at an eye-watering £850,000. Was there a hint of relief in his voice?  Whatever Mr Barker felt, he did a good job of hiding it and getting on with the business at hand. A good first lot is no guarantee of a good sale, especially one attended by so much anticipation. The second lot, another pair of butterfly pictures, went for £250,000, which was £70,000 above the high estimate. The third, a spin painting superimposed on a stencil-painted death’s head, entitled Beautiful Maat Intense Fetishistic Painting (with Extra Inner Beauty) sold for £400,000, which was the same as the high estimate. The fourth reached £570,000, which was £30,000 below the high estimate.

Was a pattern emerging, a slow drift downwards? Suddenly Lot 5 seemed very important. Whereas the first four lots had been paintings – always a bit of a sideline in Hirst’s oeuvre, albeit a lucrative one – this was a full-blown formaldehyde. It was, in fact, a fairly exact copy of one of Hirst’s most famous works, the tiger shark in formaldehyde he made for Charles Saatchi. Bidding for this duplicate shark, a slightly smaller version of the original, was painfully slow. The estimate was £4 million - £6 million, but Mr Barker struggled to get bidders even close to £3 million. He was implacable, though, fixing his prey with a stare not altogether dissimilar to that of Hirst’s shark. “Two million eight, two million eight. Who’ll give me three? Come on now. It’s against you Bruno, it’s against you. Are you out? Look in my eyes, look in my eyes and tell me.” Bruno, bidding for a telephone buyer, muttered some words, waited for the reply, and raised the bidding. It stuck again at £3.1 million, but Mr Barker seemed to know he could get more. “It’s against you, Bruno, it’s against you” – the phrase was repeated like a mantra until, once more, Bruno’s hand was raised. Then suddenly£3 million went to £4 million, and onward and upward it went. “Fair warning, fair warning, last chance – sold!!” exclaimed Mr Barker triumphantly, knocking it down, finally, at £8.5 million.

“Bang!”, indeed. From that moment, it was clear that the sale would be a resounding commercial success. Lot 13, The Golden Calf – a bullock equipped with gold horns and hooves and enclosed in a gold-plated vitrine – fetched even more than the shark, going for £9.2 million to general applause. By the end of the evening, the total amount bid had reached the heady heights of £70 million. By the end of the following day, the £100 million barrier had been broken. Not a single lot had gone unsold.

In its immediate aftermath, it was universally acknowledged that the Hirst auction had been an astonishing phenomenon, one that had probably changed the art market forever. But the exact nature of its significance remains open to debate. In an interview published in the sale catalogue, Hirst argued that he was opening up the elitist world of modern art. “The art world’s totally not democratic. You know, you walk in the gallery, you get put on a waiting list by an intimidating woman... But anybody who’s thought, you know, ‘Maybe I’ll get a Damien Hirst’ will definitely have the chance to get one from the auction.

There is something rather wonderful about the sheer perversity of Hirst’s line of argument. He wants anybody – anybody, that is, with a few hundred thousand to spare – to be able to buy his work. His ambition is to create a new kind of transglobal democracy among the art-collecting super-rich. I can’t help wondering is he is being a bit disingenuous, and if there might not be another motive – another meaning – behind the astonishing spectacle of the Sotheby’s auction.

The most obvious, indisputable fact about the auction was that almost every single work of art in it was astonishingly bad. In fact, the art in the show was so bad that it looked deliberate. Every single object in the show was a perfectly banal variation on a theme or idea that Hirst has long ago done to death. To make matters even worse, he gave it all a kind of horrible, fake gloss and glitter. The colours were candy-bright, the frames were gilded and even the vitrines were gold-plated. This lent the whole event an air of utterly naked self-pastiche. It is as if Hirst, tongue-in-cheek, were making a false form of his own work – and doing it deliberately to make fools of the sort of people naive and vulgar enough to spend thousands on a jewel-encrusted mobile telephone.

The truly extraordinary thing about the auction was the fact that it proved that there are, indeed, enough incredibly rich but utterly tasteless and ill-informed people to sustain a market for this stuff. They have been told by their advisers that contemporary art is hot and that Damien Hirst is the hottest contemporary artist. And so, no matter how bad the work issuing from his factory of studios becomes, they feel they have to buy it.

My own theory is that the artist secretly knows that his own work is dreadful. I even think he is now making it as bad as he possibly can on purpose and daring the market to recognise that by crashing – which, astonishingly, it still has not done. In fact, I am not even sure that the objects that went on sale last week are works of art. I don’t mean that as an insult, I mean it as an epistemological proposition. To my eye, the works in the sale really did look like fake Damien Hirsts, replicas or parodies that the artist has endorsed, signed and authenticated – all in the name of a far bigger project. Which brings me to my bottom line. I think the works of art, or what seemed to be the works of art, were just set dressing for a magnificent piece of theatre.

While the objects themselves were and remain utterly worthless, the sale itself was perhaps one of the most brilliant and extraordinary works of conceptual art ever created. Beautiful Inside My Head Forever was the masterpiece of Hirst’s middle age, and like the great early works of his youth its function was to expose, to lay bare, to pitilessly strip away. This time he shows us not our own mortality, the skull beneath the skin. He shows us the innards, and the utter insanity, of the market.