'Damien Hirst should not be in the Tate' says critic This April will see the first major UK retrospective of Damien Hirst's work at London's Tate Modern, but an expert has branded his contemporary conceptual art "seriously worthless" and says that it has no place in top galleries. Writing in The Independent, art critic Julian Spalding said that Hirst's works "have no artistic content and are worthless as works of art." "His work isn't worth a cent, not because it isn't great art, good art or even bad art, but because it isn't art at all," he said. Hirst should not be in the Tate. He's not an artist. What separates Michelangelo from Hirst is that Michelangelo was an artist and Hirst isn't. Spalding predicts that when collectors realise how "worthless" conceptual art is that the market will crash. Hirst is one of Britain's richest men. His 1992 pickled shark installation, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, was commissioned by Charles Saatchi for £50,000, and sold in 2005 for £6-7million. In 2007, For the Love of God - a skull encrusted with 8,601 diamonds - sold for £50million. And in 2008, Hirst auctioned 223 items of work for £111million, a world record.