In the past few years, furniture designers have been grabbing headlines and big budgets with their design art. Now artists are getting into product design and retail too.

One of the unexpected bonuses of a conceptual-art idea — an empty room with lights going on and off, say — is that it leaves the artists, often people whose hands are amazingly skilled at making things, free to create delightful household objects for the rest of us to use at home. And, luckily for us, the prices are not necessarily those of the art market.

Pretty Taxing tax-disc holders, for example, by Gary Hume, Sarah Lucas, Mat Collishaw, Abigail Lane and others are now available at Liberty, or at prettytaxing.com, and cost £40. Meanwhile, the Showroom Dummies, a design company headed by artist Abigail Lane, makes T-shirts printed with flies in acid colours (£25), screens for your living room printed with donkeys, and wallpapers with antlers and skeleton designs for £105 a roll.

It also does packs of six postcards of various skull designs — the favourite rock 'n' roll memento mori of the Young British Artists (YBAs) — for £6. Bob Dylan, for example, is going large with The Drawn Blank series, a limited edition of prints of his paintings through Castle Galleries, which retail at £1,250 each.

I'm waiting for the day when I can buy dinner plates designed by Mat Collishaw — so far at Thomas Goode in South Audley Street you can find plates by fashion designers such as Paul Smith and Vivienne Westwood but as yet nothing by established artists.

However, young artists-in-waiting at the Royal College of Art are being commissioned to design products for the shop at Lord Rothschild's Waddesdon Manor near Aylesbury, in Buckinghamshire, a stone's throw from major sculptures by Fairhurst, Lucas and others which are dotted around the gardens.

This is an initiative by Jacob Rothschild and
his curatorial team at Waddesdon, where fine-art students design wine bottle tops, plates, spoons and cups at regular museum shop prices.

Last but not least, Damien Hirst, the great circus master of the YBAs, has gone all retail, naturally on an international scale in London and New York, with the Other Criteria shops. Here you can buy T-shirts by Michael Craig-Martin for £30 (he taught many of the YBAs, and I wonder how much his deeply Catholic upbringing influenced that group, with their skulls and fragile butterflies). You can buy New Religion Pill Keyrings for £7 by Hirst, or his beautiful charm bracelets in silver or gold from £10,000. In addition, there are books, posters, ceramic pots by Eduardo Sarabia, posters by Sarah Lucas with Banksy for £18, T-shirts by Angus Fairhurst for £20, and so on.

Hirst's jaunty deckchairs with butterfly-printed sailcloth were selling for £500 a pair. Most recently he issued 4x4 bespoke stainless-steel bands covering the tyre tread with a high impact plastic central disc sporting his signature Spin paintings. They cost £900 plus VAT and are sold alongside his dotty Caproaldehyde Postcards (£1 each). If only I had a car with one of those big wheels on the end, I'd buy a wheel cover as soon as possible. They make the whole metal-and-tarmac stress of the road a sweeter experience.

So apart from the arty fun of these objects, and the fact that artists quite like making things as well as dreaming up concepts, what is the point of arty retail? I think it takes the power away from the galleries, giving it squarely back into the hands of the artists. While most galleries are supporters and enablers and fans of their artists, historically a few of them might have had too much power — perhaps taking 50 per cent of earnings and making and breaking careers at a whim. A redistribution of power might be a good thing.

The relationship between artist and public is also changed in an invigorating way. Instead of being worshippers of the mysteries of High Art, tongue-tied and awestruck in varying degrees, the public can be demanding in a way you simply couldn't be with a Hirst piece before: “Does it work, is the price right, don't you have one in blue?” has become a valid response.