And another one down...

New York art dealer Christoph Van de Weghe had eight works by Damien Hirst in his booth at the Art Basel Miami Beach fair earlier this month. He sold only two.

The small “spin” and “butterfly” paintings went for $160,000 each, compared with the asking price of $185,000. The unsold works included an $850,000 cabinet filled with cigarette butts and a blue canvas with 15 butterflies...

...Three months after Hirst sold more than 200 of his works for 111.5 million pounds ($199 million) at Sotheby’s in London, his market has contracted dramatically.

At the bellwether November sales in New York, 11 out of 17 Hirst lots failed to find buyers at three auction houses...

...“the feeling is that the Hirst market has been stretched a bit too far, almost as if it snapped and backfired.”

Read the Bloomberg story by Katya Kazakina here.