Hirst tops all living artists

Damien Hirst is today the world's most

The price passed a 19-year record set at the height of the Eighties art boom by the American Jasper Johns, now 77.

Earlier, Francis Bacon's full-length Self-Portrait of 1978 went for £21,580,000 to a collector bidding by phone from the US. This was the most paid for Bacon in London and not far short of the £26 million record set in New York in May for one of his snarling Pope paintings. The awesome rise of Contemporary Art left collectors reeling.

Hirst, in particular, has become the target of hedge fund managers and speculators. His £50million grinning skull covered with flawless diamonds is on sale in St James's, the price acting like a star in the sky to make all other prices for the artist look cheap.

The auction record for Hirst was no more than £2million a year ago. Bacon's record stood at £5 million on 1 November last year. Last night's £72 million auction was the climax of an extraordinary week of art sales, with over £500 million raining on London from around the world and British art prices spiralling to new levels.

On Wednesday, it was Lucian Freud's turn to join the party. Christie's took a record £7.7million for his portrait of Soho lounge lizard Bruce Bernard. That nearly doubled Freud's previous record of £4.2 million.

Sotheby's auctioneer and head of contemporary art, Tobias Meyer, said: "Most great American post-war artists are dead. The British alive now are relatively cheap compared to Warhol, Rothko and de Kooning.

"And it is a big difference that high American prices are paid to a high degree from the United States but the money lifting Damien Hirst, Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud is coming from round the world."

Asian bidders fought with Western rivals for work by living Chinese artists in the closing minutes of the Sotheby's auction. Speculators, out to "buy cheap and sell dear" and pay anything for a work which smacks of a masterpiece, fastened on the painter of two-faced laughing Communists, Yue Minjun, lifting him to a new plateau of £2,148,000 for a 1997 laughing Pope.

That sum was three times the pre-sale estimate and nearly twice Yue's record. It means that virtually every picture now painted by the Chinese 44-year-old will be worth something near £1 million as it falls off his easel.

Prices also trebled for "Tiananmen School" artists including Zhang Xiaogang, Fang Lijun and Liu Ye.

At the start of the week Contemporary Art had risen 700 per cent since 1985, according to Robin Duthy's Art Market Research.