Damien, the shark and a tale for our uneasy times

Indeed, there was only one tense moment at the auction. A pickled shark that had a guide price of £6 million was stuck around the £3 million mark. Think of that, a shark for just £3 million! Onlookers worried that the Hirst bubble had burst. But then a bidding war began, and a wave of applause swept the room when it finally went for £8.5 million.

I can understand the relief. Last year, Hirst produced the perfect symbol of financial excess — a platinum skull encrusted with 8,000 diamonds. The kitsch piece looked like a prop from an Indiana Jones movie but because Hirst could ask £50 million for it, the money-worshippers of the art establishment swooned.

Despite that excess producing the worst banking crisis since the ­Thirties, despite the staff at Lehman Brothers in Canary Wharf losing their jobs on the very day the auction began, Hirst's prices kept rising.

Not all the oligarchs and sheikhs out there can have gone bust, and I don't mean to insult Hirst when I say that they may regret their investments.

Look at what was on offer. I accept that putting a shark in formaldehyde was an innovative idea but its shock value has dulled with repetition. As for the rest, if you saw Hirst's butterfly pictures in a gift shop, you wouldn't think of buying them, while his more decorative work looks like the patterns on cheap wrapping paper.

Why are they selling when all around Hirst asset prices are collapsing? The rather magnificent Stuckist movement of figurative artists has a simple explanation: the art establishment in London has been dominated for too long by an in-group which favours only the conceptual art of Hirst and his colleagues.

All outsiders claim the system is rigged against them and that who you know matters more than what you do — but the Stuckists have a point.

The Turner Prize always goes to conceptual artists. Their friend and patron, Sir Nicholas Serota, has been in charge of the Tate for 21 years. As the Stuckist sculptor Nigel Konstam says: "Few dictators have lasted so long or been able to implement their policies so completely. Sir Nicholas has presided over a monoculture more complete than any other European nation."

A touch over the top but basically right. The ruling clique has been in power for decades and persuaded the public to think the art it favours is the only art worth having.

Sir Nicholas can't last for ever. One day he will retire, hopefully to be a replaced by a truth-telling little boy. When he goes, the price of sharks will crash as fast as Lehman Brothers' shares.