But then one of the Evangelists, Luke, is traditionally symbolised by a bull, and the others by other creatures, which gives the piece a weird looseness. There’s just a resonance, a reverberation, that can’t be defined but can’t be denied It gives the object a kind of soul. It’s a rare effect, which Hirst brings off from time to time – in quite a few of his very earliest works, and just occasionally in later ones.Now take a work from 2003. In the gallery upstairs, there are four more small vitrines, arranged in a cross formation – think of the logo of the Alliance & Leicester – each containing a flayed cow’s or bull’s head and a book, with each head violently pierced, porcupined, by many kitchen knives, scissors, skewers Title: Matthew Mark Luke and John. Where they join, a rubber tube also arrives, with a nozzle on it, pointing directly upward and shooting out a fine jet of air, on which plays, a few inches above, a ping-pong ball.

Title: I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now.It’s easy to call Hirst a pretentious artist He is Yet sometimes pretentiousness is his real gift. That title is wildly in excess of the piece it’s attached to. But put them together, and all sorts of chimes are set up between the impossible wish for total continuous human contact and the precarious, moment-to-moment, up-in-the-air suspense of the ping-pong ball Of course, there’s no clinch between object and meaning. To put that another way, he has written some great titles.A piece from 1991, for example Two sheets of glass, standing upright, joining in a T-shape. It’s in the way – at lucky moments – it brings together objects and meanings in beautiful, surprising conjunctions, not really corresponding, but just touching, glancing, oscillating. The strength of his work is not in its visual power or its general vision.

And it’s too obvious in its insistent self-branding as an oeuvre, with every recurrent element becoming a trademark, designed for maximum recognition – something important to many art-lovers and, indeed, art-buyers.But he has something, sometimes What Hirst has been good at is an elusive kind of allegory. His work is too obvious in its big themes, its general meditations on mortality and the meaning of life. But it never quite disguises how little interest Hirst has in the material, spatial and sculptural qualities of the objects he deploys General impact is enough. It’s too obvious in its visual impact, its shock-object window-dressing. Hirst’s recurring super-assertive display device, the steel-framed glass box, clamps attention on whatever it contains. I’ve never much admired the art of Damien Hirst: too obvious, too bleeding obvious, all the way down the line.