Despite being just a short hop across the Thames from the Houses of Parliament, Vauxhall used to be London’s least fashionable borough, an area known only for its outdoor urinals and irredeemably depressed bus station. But this atmosphere is now changing. Damien Hirst, ex-enfant terrible of the art world and once agitator-in-chief of the Young British Artists (YBAs), has chosen Vauxhall as the venue for his first and very own art gallery. Suddenly the whole place is interesting, plausible, a destination. But as well as renewing interest in an overlooked post code, Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery has occasioned a rash of questions. Central to which, as ever, is what is Hirst up to?

The legacy of his life and work thus far is such that—regardless of his standing as a maker—Hirst’s every act continues to be scrutinized for further evidence of his undeniable artistic genius or his undeniable marketeering cynicism. Or both—if, like me, you consider his principal artistic subject not to be death (as he himself often claims) but the commodification of art.

Hirst is now 50, and his career thus far has been a downhill slalom of provocation and pound signs. First, there were the name-making warehouse shows of the late 1980s, at which Charles Saatchi—the most influential British collector of the last 35 years—initially saw his work. Then, in the early 1990s, Saatchi offered to put up £50,000 toward the creation of Hirst’s infamous tiger shark in formaldehyde, entitled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.

The “dead animal” pieces from this era still represent Hirst’s best purely artistic claim to significance—the shocking reification of death in the midst of life. (Displayed in an oblong glass vitrine, that shark appears to be both wrathfully in movement and yet spectral and mummified, both fiercely alive and yet horribly dead.) These pieces are also the most revealing of his acknowledged and unacknowledged influences—Jannis Kounellis (who used dead cattle before Hirst), Francis Bacon, and the tragic American artist Paul Thek, who died in 1988 and whose series of “Meat Pieces” are surely the direct progenitor of Hirst’s own installations of butchered livestock in glass boxes.

In 1995, Hirst won the Turner Prize. In 1997, Sensation opened, the exhibition at the Royal Academy in London that canonized Hirst and the other YBAs: Tracey Emin, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Sam Taylor-Wood, Gavin Turk. This was considered a controversial show at the time, partly for its many explicit sexual pieces from Sarah Lucas, but mostly (in the U.K. at least) because of the display of Marcus Harvey’s Myra—a portrait of the child killer Myra Hindley, made up of infant handprints. Of all the artists on display, Hirst used the moment most successfully to launch himself and his work all the way to the very top of the international market. This culminated a decade later, in 2007, with For the Love of God, a platinum-cast human skull encrusted with thousands of diamonds. It cost Hirst roughly £14 million to make, and sold for £50 million to a consortium—though there has been persistent dispute of both the sale price and the identity of the purchasers.