Inside Damien Hirst's factory

For instance, in the "Power 100 list" of the respected British magazineArt Review, Hirst is ranked number one while those in his slipstream - his New York dealer Larry Gagosian, collector Steve Cohen (owner of his shark suspended in formaldehyde), his UK dealer Jopling and his business manager, Frank Dunphy - are ranked 2, 24, 31 and 91 respectively.

Team Hirst has become a formidable global brand with a production line, sales force, marketing team, public relations department, an administration block, and a finance and investment specialty. The idea of the poor, lone artist slaving away in a studio is about as far from the reality as one could get.

Gone, too, are the hell-raising drinkdrugfuelled days of boys behaving badly, such as when Hirst incurred the wrath of the Groucho Club by urinating in a sink, provoking the letter: "How would you like it if one of us came round to your house and pissed in your sink?"

Today Hirst, born in Bristol, raised by his mother, Mary, in Leeds (he never knew his father) and educated at Goldsmith's College in London, is regarded by some as the world's pre-eminent living artist, by others as a Svengali-like master manipulator.

Together with his Californian wife, Maia Norman, and their children Connor, 12, Cassius, seven, and baby Cyrus, he lives between London and his rural Devon farmhouse. Two years ago he paid £3 million for Toddington Manor, a Gothic pile with carved wood ceilings set in 23 acres in Gloucestershire, which he is renovating at a cost of £10 million to house his collection.

Before buying Toddington, he asked Dunphy, his business manager who taught him "not to be afraid of money", what he thought. "At that price," Dunphy said, "you can't afford not to buy it."

The engine room of Hirst's empire is his three factory workshops - two in south London, one in Gloucestershire - where he employs more than 100 workers to realise his creative vision.

At the Lambeth workshop in Newport Street, production director Tom Ormond, an artist in his own right, heads a team of welders and arts graduates in their twenties whose pay starts at £9 an hour. The atmosphere inside the workshop, roughly half the size of a tennis court, is of an industrious factory, with a large white board imploring staff to "clean uniforms" and tables full of workers beavering away.

Hirst is an infrequent visitor. Lauren Child, a book illustrator who painted spots for Hirst, says: "I perhaps saw Damien three times in relation to what I was doing. It was an odd but brilliant job. Pretty much all I did was paint spots. I have no idea how many spot paintings I did, we kept no record, but we were pretty quick. There's not much to think about apart from how quickly you can do it, and the colours, which were random so we could choose them."

Most assistants have been there for years, though Hirst can be ruthless if you're not up to scratch. One, Eugene, employed as a "pill polisher" for Hirst's pharmaceutical cabinet pieces, was fired, he says, because

"Hirst said my pills weren't shiny enough". Another assistant, who prefers to remain anonymous, says she resented being paid £600 to do a painting that would sell for £600,000, and that in an act of rebellion, she imbued the Spot paintings she did with a secret signature that not even Hirst picked up.

Yet another tells how when she left, she asked Hirst for one of the Spot paintings and he bluntly told her: "Make one of your own." When she said: "No, I want one of yours", he replied: "The only difference between one painted by you and one of mine is the money."

The nerve centre of Hirst's operation is his company, Science, run from a twostorey building in Gower Street where the corridor is choked with Hirst pieces cocooned in bubble-wrap and ready to be shipped to buyers and galleries, and which is home to his administrative and public relations teams. Here, he employs his brother, Bradley, together with about two dozen staff.

They liaise closely with Jopling, owner of the White Cube, and Gagosian, dubbed "the world's greatest art businessman" and owner of the Gagosian Galleries, who are the most powerful dealers in the contemporary art scene.

Jopling, 44, an Etonian married to artist Sam Taylor-Wood and son of Lord Jopling, Margaret Thatcher's agriculture minister, opened his gallery in 1993 and built his reputation as the champion of the Young British Artists. They met when Hirst sold some works to Charles Saatchi, and Jopling helped fund the next stage of his production.

The two became friends despite being so different, Jopling a toff in a Savile Row suit, Hirst a street-wise free-spirit, frequently drunk and twice arrested for shoplifting. Their relationship is understood to have taken a knock, though, when Dunphy insisted on a new deal: instead of splitting the sales proceeds 50-50 as before, Jopling was forced to accept a reduced 10 to 30 per cent of the proceeds.

Dunphy, 69, who doubles as Hirst's father figure, is the mastermind behind his transformation to global brand. Dunphy started out as an accountant on the seamier side of showbiz representing exotic dancers, but today also represents Tracey Emin and the Chapman Brothers.

Hirst says of Dunphy: "Before he came along [12 years ago], I was like a punk, really. I didn't care about money. Or I pretended not to care. But when the figures start to get high, it's hard to pretend you don't care. He got me over the fear. I'd still be drinking and I probably would have found some way to f*** it all up if Frank hadn't come along."

Although Dunphy set him free financially, Hirst says he alone jettisoned the idea that he had to actually "do" his art. "The real creative act is the conception," Hirst says, and "as progenitor of the idea, I am the artist."

But some say, perhaps unfairly, that often even the idea does not belong to Hirst. New York artist John Le Kay, formerly a friend, told the Standard he felt "punched in the stomach" when he saw Hirst's diamond skull because it was "so similar to work I showed Damien in my studio a number of years ago".

John Armleder, a Swiss artist, who has been doing "dot paintings", as he calls them, in a regular grid since the late Seventies, says: "People would see my dot paintings and say: 'But you're doing a painting like Hirst.' And I would always say: 'Yes, I'm trying my best' - because Hirst's paintings are very nice, but I had been doing them a decade before."

Hirst appears unconcerned and insists that we beg, borrow and steal ideas from each other all the time, and that he just does it better. Meanwhile, as speculators gobble up his art for investment, it seems the sky is the limit. As Hirst himself observes:

"Art is only worth what people will pay for it."

Will his oeuvre be worth anything in 50 years? An artist friend of Hirst's, whom I met at the White Cube, says: "It's like this great illusion getting bigger and bigger. It's soaring in value now, but really it's the emperor's new clothes."

He shakes his head. "You've got to hand it to Hirst, though. He is a fantastic showman, a great advertising man, full of bravado. Knowing him, he will push his factory as far as he can to see what he can get away with. The problem is he doesn't even know himself to what extent he's a legitimate artist."