Hirst opens at Tate as price of works falls Damien Hirst unveils his first big British retrospective on April 4, but the exhibition comes as the price of his work has fallen and critics have questioned the value of his famous dead animals suspended in formaldehyde and his spot paintings. London's Tate Modern is playing host to the works of one of the world's richest living artists, from sculptures made in his student days to large pieces sold at his record-breaking 2008 Sotheby's auction - Beautiful Inside My Head Forever. That sale, which raised more than £100m despite taking place on the day that Lehman Brothers collapsed, could mark the peak of his art's financial value. Since the heady days of 2008, the price of Mr Hirst's work has fallen even further than the wider contemporary art market, according to data from Art Market Research, a London organisation. Damien Hirst has underperformed since 2008 as there's been a fundamental rethink about his work. People have been asking - is it really serious? Was he just very effectively hyped?" said Robin Duthy, managing director of AMR. In 2008, the peak price for the most expensive 25 per cent of his work was nine times what it was in 2000, but it is now being bought for less than three and a half times the 2000 price. By contrast, the top 25 per cent of the Contemporary Art 100 index, which includes 100 popular modern artists, did not reach such heights: it peaked at about five and a half times the 2000 price. But it has also enjoyed a stronger and earlier recovery and is now trading at about five times that price. The market for Mr Hirst's art has even been dubbed "subprime" by Julian Spalding, an art critic who has recently published a book, entitled Con Art - Why You Ought to Sell Your Damien Hirst While You Can." The Tate Modern is hoping to draw Olympic-sized crowds to its Damien Hirst retrospective this summer as part of the Cultural Olympiad, luring both Brits and tourists with the most substantial exhibition of his work ever held in the UK, writes Hannah Kuchler. For some, it will be a chance to see the famous shark in formaldehyde in the flesh. For other, more seasoned Hirst fans, it will be an opportunity to look at the earlier works that point in that direction, such as the shelves full of pickled fish from London's Billingsgate market. The faint smell of festering flesh from "A Thousand Years," where flies feed on a cow's head before they are killed by a light trap called an "insect-o-cutor," contrasts with "In and Out of Love," in which a beautiful array of live butterflies flutter around visitors" heads, occasionally landing on them. The last room focuses on Mr Hirst's 2008 Sotheby's auction. It is packed with some of the glitziest art sold that day and covered in gold wallpaper with pictures of diamonds on it - one of just two new works. Even more spectacular is "For the Love of God," Mr Hirst's diamond-covered skull, displayed on a plinth in a pitch-black room at the centre of the Tate's vast turbine hall. But Mr Hirst said his work was still reasonably priced. "I say don't sell your Hirsts, hang on to them," he said. They are not that expensive - a couple of hundred grand for a medium-sized spot painting, when it's £150m for a Picasso. Mr Hirst has been criticised for his spot paintings, a series of 1,400 works with evenly spaced different-coloured dots, because he employs assistants to paint them, rather than making them himself. He said that he hoped the spot paintings would continue to be status symbols that the wealthy displayed on their walls like luxury goods, but he added that it was more important that people found them attractive. It amazes me that people still buy them but I always think about them beyond money. If you put one outside the pub would people take them? If you found it in the skip, people would take it," he said. Mr Hirst's more recent paintings, which were poorly received by critics when they were shown in 2009, were not included in the exhibition, which ends instead on the high of the Sotheby's auction. However, calling the exhibition his "mid-career retrospective," he insists that he is happy with the work he is producing at the moment. "What's in the future is more exciting than what's in the past, you always think the next one [artwork] is going to be the greatest one you ever made," Mr Hirst said. If you're lucky, you might get two retrospectives.