Damien Hirst’s “Black Sheep With Golden Horn.”

So did Damien Hirst shift the paradigm or just make lots of noise, money and news? And is that good or bad? The opinions swarmed, as “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever,” the two-day auction of Mr. Hirst’s new work that Sotheby’s staged in London this week, made $200.7 million for the artist and the auction house.

Knee-deep in tea leaves, the event set lots of people spinning in different tizzies. But beyond the spectacle that is Mr. Hirst’s art, life and career, none of it means much. The auction’s success doesn’t even say a lot about the non-Hirst part of the art market, although everyone in it was glad the sale didn’t fail.

The reaction to the auction and its contents has run the gamut from doomsday end-of-civilization laments and serves-you-right righteousness directed at the art world, to the crowning of Mr. Hirst as superartist and speaker of deep truths (mostly in the essays in Sotheby’s lavish three-volume catalog), to complete indifference, feigned or otherwise, on the part of many dealers.

Bears have come out of the woods, most conspicuously the critic Robert Hughes, railing with customary vigor against Mr. Hirst as he railed against Julian Schnabel in the 1980s. Mr. Hughes wrote that Mr. Hirst’s famous sculpture of a dead shark would be more interesting if the artist had caught the shark himself, which may be a somewhat exaggerated reaction to the Conceptual Art infrastructure of Mr. Hirst’s otherwise quite physical art.

It’s amazing how many people behave as if, until quite recently, art and money have always been on opposite sides of some ethical bundling board, as if they have not always been intimately connected. Artists have to survive, and they make art to be sold; that’s one of the positive reactions they want for their work. They are among those people lucky and industrious enough to live, often extremely well, by doing something they love passionately, which is everyone’s goal. And artists have always had a big say in how they do business and get exposure.

Such instincts caused Manet and Courbet to mount public exhibitions of their work (in tents) in 19th-century Paris. As one British writer pointed out this week, at around the same time the Victorian painter William Holman Hunt bypassed the usual arrangement of selling art through the Royal Academy to work directly with dealers. More recently these instincts have generated alternative spaces and artist-run galleries as well as inspiring many artists, like Mr. Hirst, to work separately with different dealers around the world, rather than funneling all arrangements through a single “home” gallery.

Mr. Hirst pooh-poohs dealers and their 50 percent commission because he can. He has always excelled at running his career and garnering publicity, fusing his art, his life and his business arrangements into a single ball of wax. He is a classic self-starter and scenemaker, quick to take things into his own hands, as he did with the 1988 “Freeze” exhibition, which introduced a new generation of artists before galleries or museums had any inkling of them. That show also initiated an entirely new British art scene, and Mr. Hirst remains the Atlas on whose shoulders this scene still rests, as he regularly reminds everyone.

His restaurant, the auction of its contents and his recent diamond-covered skull are of a piece with the London sale, as others have noted. So is his 2005 show at the Gagosian Gallery in New York. Its dozens of slovenly realist paintings executed by assistants demonstrated Mr. Hirst’s selling power and his assembly-line working methods while making the gallery look amazingly sleazy, all of which was the point.

The art market is to Mr. Hirst as popular culture is to artists like Jeff Koons: his main content. Mr. Hirst revels in revealing its machinery and making it jump through hoops. In this sense he has gotten the most mileage out of the commodity-minded tactics of the late-1980s trendlet known here as Neo-Geo, with its shiny surfaces, expensive materials and startling rearrangements of pieces of reality.

Artists who excel at running their own careers usually fail to see the point of dealers, even though no one, except artists, risks more in the art world. And, unlike the chief executives of many American corporations, when dealers fail their reward is to close up shop, usually without much in the way of golden parachutes. Mr. Hirst claims, fatuously, that he is “democratizing” art, but he is really just expanding his client base to buyers who don’t know much about art.

Interestingly, the pre-auction world tour did not include a stop at Sotheby’s in New York, although a meager selection of dot paintings was exhibited in Bridgehampton. Neither Sotheby’s nor Mr. Hirst is interested in American collectors: their money may be losing value, but they may also know better.

Going by the catalog, the 223 works in the auction were familiar if not banal, compared with the sale’s totality as performance art. They look calculatedly safe and aimed to please in their recycling and refining of a careful selection of previous ideas. (No rotting cows’ heads and flies in big glass cases, for example.) He and his staff of 200 added butterflies to the spin paintings, which are now sometimes shaped like hearts. They amped up the biblical symbolism of the dead animals with the addition of gold and the usual ham-handed but effective titles. And previous Hirst works continue to be reincarnated on canvas.

“Young Damien,” for example, is a new painting based on one of my favorite Hirsts: a black-and-white photograph titled “With Dead Head” (1981 to 1991) that shows him bending over, his grinning face cheek to cheek with that of a cadaver who could easily have been his grandfather. The image says everything about Mr. Hirst’s gleeful embrace of life’s nastier aspects, of corpses and decay, and most of all of death, and about his desire to shock, his charm and his love of playing the bad boy. It also has the energy and optimism of his best work.

All these feelings seem to swirl around the auction. But as has been increasingly the case, they pertain almost exclusively to Damien World, a self-enclosed parallel art universe whose best product may be, as with Joseph Beuys but not Andy Warhol, Mr. Hirst himself.

Outside of Damien World, the auction’s most interesting evidence is less about the growing, “democratized” art market than about the fragmentation inherent in globalism. The art world can expand only so far before it splinters, and that disintegration has started. Whether they are named China, Moscow, Christie’s or Damien World, the various kingdoms of the art world are multiplying into slightly overlapping, more or less provincial spheres, which may have always been the case.

And Mr. Hirst may simply have morphed into the Thomas Kincaid of contemporary art, running a factory that produces major, minor and starter Hirsts. Eventually he will probably cut the auction houses out of the deal, too.