By Duncan Macmillan Published on Thursday 19 April 2012 00:00 Damien Hirst's work still has the power to shock, revolt and fascinate, but for someone so financially successful he's spent a long time resting on his diamond-encrusted laurels Damien Hirst London Tate Modern AS FLIES to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport. Like Shakespeare's wanton boys, Damien Hirst kills a lot of flies and he too does it, you could say, for his sport (as we regularly conflate sport and art, or our governments do). In Hirst's one man-show at Tate Modern, A Thousand Years is a rather revolting installation in which maggots hatch into flies, the flies gorge on a rotting cow's head and then immolate themselves on a blue-light fly-zapper. Black Sun is a big circular object that could be a glossy black painting except that it is composed of piled up dead flies. Spoken by the Earl of Gloucester in King Lear, Shakespeare's summary of the human condition is as terse as it is bleak, and that too finds many echoes in Hirst's work. As it is for Shakespeare, his flies are a metaphor for the shortness of life and the arbitrariness of death. In another work, In and Out of Love (White Paintings and Live Butterflies), Hirst uses butterflies, not bluebottles. It is prettier, but the point is much the same. The work is a room with a tropical climate and plastic curtains to keep in the exotic butterflies that flutter round your head and feed on flowers and fruit on shelves and tables. Pupae hang on panels on the walls, the white paintings of the title, visibly hatching into the next generation. The butterfly is an age-old metaphor for life's beauty and brevity. Hirst's butterflies are already very dead, however, in a series of huge butterfly-wing collages shaped like stained glass windows, and as brilliant. The futility of our efforts to appeal against death's arbitrariness seems to be the point of his displays of pills, medicine cabinets and surgical instruments that repetitively occupy whole rooms. One work, Pharmacy, seems to be a chemist's shop transported in its entirety. It is a metaphor, no doubt, but it is desperately overworked. The shark, titled the Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, and the equally celebrated cow and calf, Mother and Child Divided, all suspended in formaldehyde in massive glass cases, are also in part a satire on our feeble efforts at eternity. The shark is curiously unimpressive, however. It's meant to shock as a raw, killing machine, an agent of death, but actually it looks papery and bit toothless. The cow and calf are cut in half to give you a nice cross section of the inner machinery we share with them, another ironic reminder of our mortality. These are unpleasant enough, but one of the most unpleasant objects is Crematorium, a giant ashtray filled with ash and fag ends. It stinks, but the point is the same: life's a brief puff, death is built in and all that's left is ash. He returns to the point in Dead Ends Died Out, Examined, an array of fag ends on shelves in a display case. The last item in the show, however, is a white dove suspended in formaldehyde, wings outstretched. Its title is The Incomplete Truth. I wonder if this suggests a glimmering of a new departure. The point of all the pills and chemists" shops is implicitly that they are our substitute for religion. The dove perhaps takes that up, but he doesn't develop the thought, and most of what he does still revolves in a circular fashion around a few ideas, death uppermost among them. It is the main topic from the beginning and he hasn't really moved on. With Dead Head is a photo of the artist posing with what is ostensibly the head of a dead man. This photo, the shark, the flies and the butterflies were all made in 1990 and 1991. They are early works. Since then it is the millions Hirst has made that have become the most conspicuous fact about him. His art has become repetitive, too, and is even mass-produced. He made his first spot painting at the beginning of his career, for instance. Since then he has repeated it endlessly with a factory to churn them out. In them, his art mimics the commercial world it is now part of, where marketing has absorbed the product; where the logo has taken over and the product itself is almost redundant. The spot paintings are Hirst's logo. Nor is he coy about his commercial success. He entered the art market directly with a sale at Sothebys a few years ago and very publicly made millions from art largely produced in his art factory; a factory from which, like any good capitalist, when the recession came he promptly sacked part of his work force. He may claim as he does that the art matters more to him than the money, but it is sometimes hard to credit faced with that sort of story. Indeed, his diamond-crusted skull unambiguously celebrates wealth. It is displayed apart and alone in a room so perfectly dark that an unhappy attendant has to stand there all day with a discreet torch to show you how to escape. It's a shrine to bling: diamonds are forever, life is short and money is what matters most in our brief tenure of it, or at least that seems to be his message. As the poor individual whose skull it once was gets no mention at all, you could add the thought that in death we are anonymous, but as maker of such a conspicuous object, it is clear that Hirst has no wish to be so in life. But will he be remembered? Is he any good? He is a very successful showman, certainly, and his preoccupation with death has produced a small number of striking metaphors, but that doesn't make his achievement anywhere equal to the hype; it doesn't match the money to the art. Turner Inspired. In the light of Claude London Nationa; Gallery Rating; **** Elsewhere in London, you can see real greatness to give you a perspective. Turner Inspired: in the Light of Claude at the National Gallery brings together two of the very greatest. It is a study in homage, Turner's homage to Claude, but also in continuity. There are some marvellous pictures too. Claude loved to paint straight into the light, but as he did so he managed to balance its intensity with the cool structure of his composition. In Perseus and the Origin of Coral, we look from a shadowed foreground straight into the sun, but the picture has a silvery light and a wonderful tranquillity. Turner paints the moon to get the same effect in Keelmen Hauling Coals by Moonlight, a picture of surpassing beauty. Turner constantly emulated Claude in both his command of light and of structure. In one watercolour he paints the sun, a simple disk and nothing else but a golden glow. It is still a homage to Claude, but an extraordinarily modern image and so as Turner looks back, he also looks forward. Monet is already heralded in what he does, so the show is not just a study in one relationship, but in a great continuity of which it is part. Titian's First Masterpiece: The Flight into Egypt London National Gallery That continuity is also adumbrated in Titian's First Masterpiece: The Flight Into Egypt, also at the National Gallery, where Titian's first major painting, on loan from the Hermitage, is the centrepiece of an exhibition devoted to Venetian painting at the beginning of the 16th century. The Flight into Egypt is a big picture and a marvellous landscape, the beginning, perhaps, of the tradition that continues with Claude and Turner and indeed Monet and beyond. Contemplating that kind of great continuity, you do wonder where an artist like Hirst fits in, if at all. Damien Hirst until 9 September, Turner until 5 June , Titian until 19 August