Is nothing sacred?

DAMIEN HIRST may be rich and famous, but he does not have everything. The 46-year-old artist has never had a solo retrospective in a modern-art museum. If he is to turn his notoriety into immortality, he needs the backing of public institutions and the praise of serious critics. Mr Hirst and his dealers have favoured fast sales over the art-historical side of his career. But Tate Modern has come to the rescue with an Olympic blockbuster show, which runs for five months from April 4th.

The exhibition consists of 73 works made over a 22-year period, arranged chronologically to convey the evolution of Mr Hirst’s ideas. The general trajectory is from gritty to glitzy, from punk assemblages, such as cabinets filled with pills and cigarette butts, to art that looks like bespoke luxury goods. If viewers cast aside their hostility, what may astonish is Mr Hirst’s ability to transform dry conceptual art into witty, emotionally engaging work.

Six of the works in the show are owned or partially owned by the Tate. This includes two “still lives” which flicker between poignancy and irony: “Away from the Flock” (1994), a white sheep suspended in a tank of formaldehyde, and “Mother and Child Divided” (1993), a cow and calf split between four tanks. Of the 67 pieces borrowed for the show, only three have come from public institutions. The rest are on loan from dealers and a range of private collectors, including Miuccia Prada, Bernard Arnault and Steve Cohen. Luckily for them, works that have been anointed by the Tate command more credibility and a premium upon resale.

Yet the number-one lender to the Hirst retrospective is the artist himself. In addition to some early pieces, a breezy spin painting and a six-tonne bronze sculpture of an anatomical model, he has lent “A Thousand Years” (1991), a glass box that bears witness to the life cycle of flies. It was one of a dozen early works that the artist purchased back from his first patron, Charles Saatchi, in 2003. Mr Hirst suspects the sculpture is his most exciting piece. Many prefer a more beautiful work with a similar theme that he made a few months later, titled “In and Out of Love”. This installation consists of two rooms, one in which live butterflies hatch from pupae embedded in white paintings, and another in which dead butterflies are pressed onto the surfaces of brightly coloured canvasses. The show reunites these two rooms for the first time in 20 years.

The Tate’s turbine hall, a kind of post-industrial cathedral for art, will be given over to Mr Hirst’s diamond skull, “For the Love of God” (2007), which the artist co-owns with his London gallery, White Cube. The small platinum sculpture, which features real human teeth and over 8,000 diamonds, was promoted with an asking price of 50m—a tabloid tactic that clearly missed its target as the work failed to sell. The skull will be dramatically spot-lit in a dark room, much like jewellery at an auction preview. Officially, the display is not a marketing device but a comment on the “belief system” of capitalism.

Money is a theme but also a problem. The retrospective was meant to travel to the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles, but it has been put on indefinite hold because the show is so expensive. Works such as Mr Hirst’s famous shark (ie, “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” from 1991, pictured) take at least six technicians and a full seven days to install. The price of crating, shipping, installing and insuring Mr Hirst’s works exceeds MoCA’s entire annual exhibition budget of $3m—a sum donated by Eli Broad, a philanthropist. He has lent two works from his substantial collection of Hirsts to the Tate.

There are two conspicuous exclusions from the retrospective. First, it contains no figurative paintings of any kind—no photorealist works, no microscopic views of cancer cells, none of the canvasses that Mr Hirst paints with his own hand in the style of Francis Bacon. As it happens, most critics find these paintings painful to behold. Second, the exhibition omits “The Golden Calf” (2008), a bull with gold horns and hooves in a gold-plated tank, which was the centrepiece of Mr Hirst’s 2008 Sotheby’s sale, “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever”. The Wall Street Journal reported that Francois Pinault bought the 10.3m bull, a perplexing move for the owner of Christie’s, a connoisseur with minimalist taste. Certainly Mr Pinault has deep investments in Mr Hirst’s work. He has lent two pieces to the Tate, including an important precursor to the shark, “Isolated Elements Swimming in the Same Direction for the Purpose of Understanding (right)”.

Many collectors of Mr Hirst’s work hope that this show will reinvigorate his market. According to artnet, a firm that tracks the art market, in 2011 one in four Hirst works that came up for auction failed to sell, and his highest price was $1.7m, down from $19m in 2007. Last year total auction turnover in Hirst works was a mere $29.6m, placing him well behind artists such as Gerhard Richter, whose work earned almost $200m in auction sales, and Zeng Fanzhi, a Chinese painter who is probably the richest artist in the world.