The market for artworks by Damien Hirst shrank by an astounding 93% between autumn 2008 and the same time in 2009, reports the latest issue of the Economist, and this year has been even worse. This has less to do with the recession than with the two-day sale at Sotheby's of Hirst's work in September 2008. The auction – held just as Lehmann Brothers fell across the Atlantic – was conceived by the artist himself as a work called Beautiful Inside My Head Forever; $270m (£175m) worth of art was sold. Buyers included a handful of billionaires from the former Soviet Union, Miuccia Prada and, it is thought, the Qatari royal family. The effect of offering for sale 233 lots, however, was to flood the market, meaning that now is not a great time to sell works by Hirst; rather, it's a buyers' market. Sellers ought to hang on: the Tate is in talks to mount a huge career retrospective of Hirst to coincide with the 2012 Olympics, the first since the 2004 survey at the National Archaeological Museum in Naples. At that point the market is likely to bounce.

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