Hirst sells his soul, to footballers’ wives and the ignorant

At first glance it appeared to be a retrospective of the two full decades since 1988 when he sprang into celebrity but at a second glance it was evident to long-term Damien­watchers that the sometime freshness had evaporated and that whatever it was that once caused outrage is now stale, for what Damien offered in this sale was not the urgent originality of his ideas when young but their polished revision and repetition by the slave labourers on his production line.

For all its glitz and glamour it was a sad occasion, for here was the Damien who once seemed a sincere, if wayward intelligence, selling his soul to the soulless. His exhibition at the ICA in 1992, four years into his career as a professional artist, was its high point, enough of its exhibits outweighing with high seriousness the frivolity of others. The cages, cabinets and fish in tanks, the spot and butterfly paintings, were all there, and they then had about them a craftsman quality of execution that is wholly lacking in the recent reworkings of these old ideas. In its place there is a new vulgarity and extravagance, a new glint and gloss and glister, a show of gold leaf and precious stones, a sense that everything has been redesigned with the wives of footballers in mind.

Wandering through Sotheby's, it seemed transformed into the nightmare lobby of a would-be grand hotel in Miami or Las Vegas — the pill-box pages and their brassy baggage trolleys were missing but the harsh lights, glass cases, reflecting surfaces and celebrities were there.

A nincompoop guiding a bevy of Dolce and Gabbana housewives through the masterpieces waved towards some desperate scribbles and proclaimed them to be, at £30,000 or so, trifles that every one of them could easily afford, and a loudmouth pop star much given to troubling our charitable consciences proclaimed the whole show to be "fucking marvellous".

And there was the rub — all this was pop-star stuff, not art. It was addressed to the moneyed with no taste, to the man with the Maybach or the Rolls, to the arrogant ignorant who have suddenly become the arbiters, not of art, but of what must be in and what is out in the households of the truly filthy rich. "What are we waiting for, gathered in the market-place?" asked the poet Cavafy, to which came the answer: "The barbarians are to arrive today" — as, indeed, they did, laden with money-bags.