Art & Finance - is it time to kill the Golden Calf?

It was Bob Dylan, in the lyrics to "Gates of Eden", who rhymed "Golden Calf" with "laugh". And that is what one had to do, in this almost surreal week, a time when the art world seemed to exist in a different universe to any other. The ironies with which Damien Hirst laces his art works paled in comparison to the real-life ironies: the astonishing bonanza of Hirst's sale at Sotheby's taking place at just the same moment as august financial institutions were crumbling around us. On our television screens were shots of well-dressed young people heading for the down-escalator to the tube carrying their eloquent cardboard boxes, and the running caption along the screen was a comment from the FSA: "Confidence will return when bottom is reached."

In the art world, one might change that to read: "Confidence will return when peak is reached." But where is the peak? It was widely predicted by pundits - with the usual helpings of envy, spite and spleen - that Hirst's sale would be the one too high to scale, but in fact it turned out to be like walking in the Alps, where each peak only reveals the prospect of the next.

As the gallery season has got properly underway all over the world in the last few weeks, there were no signs of strain at lavish openings in New York, Los Angeles, Zurich, Vienna - and of course Moscow, where Daria Zhukova this week launched her converted bus garage with much more hype than content.

Yes, like the revelling Israelites around the Golden Calf in Poussin's painting, the art world parties on. The best of all Hirst's multi-layered and self-referential ironies is that his Golden Calf is - like the idol of the Biblical and Koranic legends, which a furious Moses destroyed - created in an unstable medium. His formaldehyde menagerie has a famously limited shelf-life, and even if the artist does give buyers a maintenance contract, the message is clear: nothing is forever; party while you can. Vita longa, ars brevis.