THUESDAY HIRST

LONDON - While Wall Street was crumbling on Tuesday, an auction house in central London was seeing Damien Hirst, the richest and now one of the most financially savvy artists in British history, smash records in a sale that raked in nearly $200 million.The two-day sale of 223 pieces of Hirst's artwork made a spectacular 111 pounds ($199 million), beating expectations for 98 million pounds ($175 million), Sotheby's auction house told Forbes.com. It also exceeded the 65 million pound ($116.2 million) target Hirst had reportedly set for himself. The artwork sold included a shark in formaldehyde and a 1320-lb bull in formaldehyde whose hooves and horns were cast in solid 18-carat gold, named "The Golden Calf."The auction house would not give details on the commission it was would take from the sale, but press reports indicated Hirst would bring home the vast majority of the profits. According to the sale's organizers, this was the first time an artist had sold his work directly, bypassing art dealers who typically collect up to 40.0% of an auction's sales in commission fees. (See "Going Once, Going Twice…")The auction, entitled "Beautiful Inside My Head Forever," beat the record for the highest ever sale dedicated to a single artist, with the $20 million brought in for 88 works by Picasso in 1993."It is a completely surreal scenario," said Charles Dupplin, an art expert with Hiscox. "The day the financial world was living a black Monday, art as a whole remained confident. It is remarkable."Art experts have been looking carefully at exhibitions of this caliber to see how resilient the art sector is. So far, it has apparently been able to buck the downturn in the global economy.But sales might not be able to keep up for long. "The art world has a history of lagging behind other parts of the economy," Dupplin said. "It can't keep going up forever. It might as well be that looking back in the future we will see this auction as a moment when the market reached its peak."