According to the Telegraph...
Damien Hirst's works are "absurd" and "tacky commodities", according to Robert Hughes, a prominent Australian art critic.
The critic said commercial pieces with large price tags mean "art as spectacle loses its meaning" and identified the British artist's work as a cause of that loss. Hughes says it is "a little miracle" Hirst's 35ft statue Virgin Mother, could be worth £5 million and yet be made by someone "with so little facility."
He calls Hirst's formaldehyde tiger shark, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a "tacky commodity", and "the world's most over-rated marine organism", despite collector Charles Saatchi selling it for close to £7 million in 2004.
His criticism comes amid claims Hirst is now so rich he is a dollar billionaire, and if his empire continues at the rate it is going, he will soon be worth more than Sotheby's, the auction house.
Hughes, 70, is famous for his 1980 BBC series The Shock of the New, which made the theories behind modernism in art accessible to a wider audience.
The latest attack was made in a Channel 4 documentary about art and money called The Mona Lisa Curse, to be shown on September 21, which details Hughes's observations over 50 years as a New York-based art reviewer.
He says works of art now operate like film stars, starting in 1962 when Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa left The Louvre in Paris to go on display in New York, the long queues turning the masterpiece into a mere spectacle.
It is not the first time Hughes has made public his contempt for Hirst's art. Making a speech four years ago at the Royal Academy of Art's annual dinner, he said: "A string of brush marks on a lace collar in a Velazquez can be as radical as a shark that an Australian caught for a couple of Englishmen some years ago and is now murkily disintegrating in its tank on the other side of the Thames."
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