GO LONDON newsletter Bringing our city to your living room Enter your email address Continue Please enter an email address Email address is invalid Fill out this field Email address is invalid You already have an account. Please log in Register with your social account or click here to log in I would like to receive the best London offers and activities every week, by email Update newsletter preferences

Damien Hirst was born in 1965. At 18 he took the year-long Foundation Course at what was then known as The Jacob Kramer College of Art in Leeds. After a two-year gap labouring on London building sites he started the BA course at Goldsmiths College. There compulsory drawing and every other discipline that might lead to his becoming a professional artist in the traditional sense had been abandoned; instead, wild theory, wilder ideas, and art history of the most erratic, shallow and misleading kind had absolute supremacy over all the ancestral skills of art in its ancestral forms. In 1988, two years into the course, he was the presiding genius of Freeze, the now famous three-part exhibition in a disused Docklands warehouse that proved to be the crucible in which the group known as the YBAs (Young British Artists) was formed. In 1991 the Institute of Contemporary Arts gave him, at 26, his first solo exhibition in a publicly funded art gallery; the following year he was nominated for the Turner Prize; and in 1995, at 30, he won it, trouncing the feeble opposition of Mona Hatoum, Callum Innes and Mark Wallinger.

He had by then been the subject, in whole or part, of some forty exhibitions (many more if we count all the venues to which some of them travelled) in Britain, Germany (the consequence of a year’s fellowship residency in Berlin), Italy, America and elsewhere. He had also had the support of the Arts Council, the Tate, Hayward, Serpentine and Whitechapel Galleries as well as the ICA, of several leading London dealers in contemporary art, and, most important of all because of the publicity attached to the relationship, of Charles Saatchi at his most flamboyant. Saatchi not only owned the notorious shark in formaldehyde, dubbed The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, of 1991, but was rumoured to have had a hand in its conception and the organisation and costs involved in its making. To supply the work for so many exhibitions, patrons and collectors, Hirst must have had substantial financial support from the very beginning, even while still a student — how else could he have afforded the technical assistance required to construct the 76 leak-proof cases of formaldehyde for the fish of his Isolated Elements swimming in the same Direction for the Purposes of Understanding, of 1991, let alone the tank big enough to hold the shark?

Rapidly he became dependent largely on ideas first developed as a student and their industrial repetition. The ubiquitous Spot Paintings, for example — of which there are some 1,500, with the production line still working at full pelt — were first produced in 1986, more than a quarter of a century ago. Hirst himself now has no hand in them — they are the product of assistants given only the simple instruction to keep the colours of the spots entirely random with no perceptible sequence. To justify this workshop practice he raises the ghost of Rubens — but not even the most wretched apprentice in 17th-century Antwerp was still producing in 1635 precisely what Rubens had painted in 1610; nor would Rubens have charged so much for a painting not even touched by his hand - he charged according to a tariff that recognised the difference in value between work executed entirely by himself, by himself and assistants, by assistants with an improving touch or two by the great man, and entirely by assistants of varying levels of competence. Hirst charges as though everything is entirely by himself; this is only justified if we are fools enough to accept that the concept is the quintessential work of art and it is of no consequence who gives it physical embodiment; but from this it is possible to argue that in our postmodern art world we have every right to paint our spots ourselves — with a little practice they will be neither better nor worse than those marketed by Hirst, neither more nor less his autograph work.

The pharmaceutical cupboards and vitrines too reach back to Hirst’s student years — the first, Sinner and Enemy, were produced in 1988 and ten more were made within a year, four of them exhibited in his graduate show of 1989. Assigned such none pharmaceutical titles as god, Pretty Vacant and Anarchy (perversely, the early spots were dubbed Acetic Anhydride, Aprotinin, Calciferol et al), they are essentially everyone’s bathroom cabinet enlarged and every single one of us has from time to time done what he did — that is, lend order to disorderly arrangement. A decade later he was still stocking vitrines, but with skulls, bones, brains and surgical instruments, and some developments were homages to the 17th-century Cabinet of Curiosities and to the medical models and specimens accumulated in the pan-European schools of surgery and medicine in the Enlightenment. Even so the basic concept of the cupboard or vitrine remained unchanged. In 2008, however, Hirst reverted to his earliest pattern and repeated, for his now notorious auction sale at Sotheby’s, pretty well exactly what he had made twenty years before.

In the bottom left-hand corner of Sinner is a small medical model of a female torso with the belly skin and ribs removed. It is not the same as the gigantic Hymn of 1999-2005 that once stood in the forecourt of the Royal Academy, subject to accusations of plagiarism, but, apart from the overwhelming scale, is very like and again demonstrates that once Hirst has lit on an idea he keeps it on the boil for years, even decades, until he has exploited its every possible variant and purpose. Add to Hymn and Sinner the organs in specimen jars of 1991, the fish, the shark, the butterflies and the farm animals in tanks of formaldehyde, and it must seem to the enquirer that, with the exception of the Spots (though even for these he claimed a “scientific approach”), all his ideas were borrowed from things seen as a boy on frequent prowlings in the university’s anatomy museum before, at 19, he left Leeds for London.

If we compare the major works executed for the Sotheby’s sale of 2008 (his last significant exposure in Britain) and the later works in the new but meagre retrospective at Tate Modern (only 73 exhibits), with the earlier examples, we see gestation and production periods of more or less a quarter of a century. Did any great artist’s workshop of the Renaissance or the Baroque ever develop so little over so long? It helps to look at Hirst less as an artist than as a craftsman, a maker, even a manufacturer, of extravagant goods desirable to footballers’ wives and cupiditous collectors governed by envy and social inferiority rather than connoisseurship. Why should Hirst, as a businessman (of which indisputable proof lies on his website, even at the market-trader level with trinkets and souvenirs), embark on serious development or fundamental change when he has identified half a dozen formulae that need only to be “refreshed” if they are to sustain their appeal to his hedge-fund, filthy rich, pop-star, monkey-see monkey-do, done-thing clientele? To own a Hirst is to tell the world that your bathroom taps are gilded and your Rolls-Royce is pink.

In the exhibition at Tate Modern spin paintings revolve, a beach ball balances on an intolerably noisy jet of air, we wander from John Bell and Croydon into branches of Boots, John Lewis, Divertimenti and David Mellor. Though tedious, this is bearable. The butterfly room, however, is unbearable. I saw its first incarnation in the Woodstock Gallery in 1991 and was sickened by it then, for it knowingly involves the death of butterflies, probably tens of thousands of them by the time this wretched exhibition ends on September 9. Even before the exhibition opened these creatures were fluttering exhausted on the gallery floor, denied anything that resembles their natural habitat. How is it that they are “only” butterflies? How is that the RSPCA does not protest? How can any decent man or woman walk through this room — the In and out of Love — without the rise of anger at such cruelty? What an artist does at 26 one may perhaps attribute to the waywardness of his intelligence, but at 47 how could Hirst bear to repeat such vain cold-blooded inhumanity?

All who care for living things should boycott this exhibition. Disgust must be the response of the sane, not only to the use, abuse and deaths of butterflies, but to the exploitation of farm animals mercilessly slaughtered in the knacker’s yard and, at an aesthetic level, to Hirst’s taste for the ghastly glitz and glamour found in Miami’s holiday hotels. I can sum it up as shiny shit. Bob Geldof, on the other hand, might repeat his estimation of Hirst’s Sotheby’s sale when, awestruck as he was by its garish glister he bellowed “f***ing marvellous” for all to hear.

Hirst himself will, no doubt, describe this show of his work too as “epic”. It is nothing of the kind; a meagre third of the number of exhibits in the Sotheby’s sale, it is a little more didactic. A handful of things tell us how Hirst began, another handful the state of his imaginings in 2006-9 — bigger, much bigger and much shinier, but essentially the same — and between them lie the sterile old familiars that, once seen, have nothing more to give. Put bluntly, this man’s imagination is quite as dead as all the dead creatures here suspended in formaldehyde.

Damien Hirst at Tate Modern, SE1 (020 7887 8888, tate.org.uk) until September 9. Open Sun-Thurs, 10am-6pm; Fri-Sat, 10am-10pm. Admission £15.50, concs available.