Subjects on Thought for the Day last week: war memorials, Felix Baumgartner, Malala Yousafzai, the joys of taxation and, with Ilfracombe in the news, the spiritual lessons of Damien Hirst.

Hirst has just presented the town with a 65ft sculpture, a variant on the flayed pregnant girls series he began in 2006, when he parked the original Virgin Mother in the courtyard of the Royal Academy. By dint of adding Old Bailey-style accessories to this Virgin, whose pose also references Degas's Little Dancer, he has transformed the sculpture, never much of a critical hit, into an allegory for truth and justice called Verity. Some people, as Hindu Akhandadhi Das said in his Thought for the Day, do not like it. But other people do. Either way, as Das noted, the sculpture is controversial and "thought-provoking". We are having a heated debate.

So much so that this gift to Ilfracombe could succeed more triumphantly than any other piece in the artist's career, even his shark, in fulfilling the ambition he once described in interviews with Gordon Burn. "It's, like," he said, "if a tree falls down on your land, or in your street, it looks… bigger. You drive to work every day, everything's the same, you know where you are. Then one day you drive to work, and a tree's fallen down, and you go, 'Fucking hell!' You look at the tree and it's massive. You never notice it until it falls down. Artists do that!"

But it is, crucially, thanks to the economic ambitions of Ilfracombe's tourism officials that this conception of artistic merit has found its ultimate expression, in the shape of the gigantic and arrestingly hideous Verity. In 2010, in the hope of attracting more visitors, Ilfracombe, to quote its regeneration board, "relaunched its destination identity" with the strapline "curious coastal charm". No disrespect to its creators, but the slogan had barely begun to resonate before Hirst, who lives locally, offered Verity, on a 20-year loan. In reply, I imagine, the officials could only ask a) how difficult is it to clean guano off a wiggly bronze foetus? and b) couldn't he make it 30 years?

For a struggling harbour town that might, in normal circumstances, be planning its tourism offer around walks, shops and, funds permitting, a one-squid aquarium, Hirst's gigantic insult to the landscape is a regeneration board's dream come true. Even a smallish Hirst in the car park would be better, in coastal curiousness terms, than a tinies' carousel, but the enormous Verity is not just bigger than any of Hirst's previous entrail-virgins, she towers, no doubt by design, over all recent products of artistic gigantism.

Ten inches higher than Gormley's Angel of the North, the Hirst sculpture is further equipped with realistic hair and a bottom as well as her controversial foetus and any amount of pick-your-own allegorical content. She is indisputably more of a landmark, being visible for miles, than Charles Jencks's recumbent, pregnant Lady of the North whose ginormous tits now serve as a top Northumberland destination.

"A significant piece of contemporary public art that reflects the context and history of the town is felt to have huge potential for the regeneration of the town," enthused Ilfracombe's regeneration board. "Its positioning should ideally be in a showcase location with visibility from within and around the town."

That this piece of public art is, in reality, comically alien to anything identifiably Ilfracombe (except for incomer Damien Hirst) and will be considered, even by many of Hirst's old admirers, as infinitely worse than artistically insignificant, cannot diminish its regenerative value.

As an approving official from English Heritage told North Devon planners, not risking any aesthetic judgment: "This sounds like an important and thought-provoking project that would add a considerable amount of interest to Ilfracombe." Even Hirst, to judge by the planning application, was quite happy for the focus to be, primarily, on the sculpture's "significant impact to the tourism industry".

This indifference to Verity's appearance, if it astonished parts of North Devon, may be less amazing to Londoners who have learned – from Maggi Hambling's Oscar Wilde, from the St Pancras lovers, from a 33ft horse's head at Marble Arch and, above all, from the Animals in War monument in Park Lane – that the only reasonable expectation from most contemporary public sculpture is a chastening if unintended message about human futility. The one redeeming aspect of the Animals in War monument, 58ft wide by 55ft deep and featuring mules tottering towards a hole in a wall, is the way its inscription gives a voice to the dumb recipients of public sculpture, as well as the mules: "They had no choice."

Tom Lubbock, the brilliant art critic, once pointed out that for all the fuss about individual public sculptures, most are ignored. "The people who put them up don't care what they look like. The people who walk past them don't care either. Why should a few fusspots interrupt this happy reciprocity?" But in the event that people stop saying "fucking hell", both Ilfracombe and Hirst will have failed. From the cream tea point of view, the more gobsmackingly nauseating Hirst's allegory is said to be, the more profitable. Already, the national media have reported enough Clochemerle-style stand-offs to confirm, to every ailing resort in the land, the genius of putting the economy before the lamentations of leading art critics. For even property prices should benefit, according to television property expert Sarah Beeny. "It will attract tourists and new buyers to the area," she wrote in the Mirror. "I hope when opponents see the good this statue will do, they will change their minds." On this basis, rival resorts will note, Mr Hirst has yet to do a virgin with an allegorical balloon, golf club or designer tote.

Among the traders likely to benefit from this marriage of commerce and commerce, it emerges, is a harbour-front restaurant, 11 The Quay, owned by Mr Hirst. Whether or not he planned to become to Ilfracombe as, say, Rick Stein is to Padstow, or the Prince of Wales is to Poundbury, as Jack the Ripper is to Whitechapel, the scale of another Hirst enterprise should ensure, if it succeeds, that the rebranding of this small town as, effectively, Hirstacombe or Ilfrahirst is irreversible. Shortly before the Verity application, Hirst proposed a 500-home "eco-estate", to be characterised, his architect explained, by "the kind of homes he would want to live in". Their exceptional quality, he argued, should not be compromised by excessive demands for affordable homes. "This is a very ambitious project only made possible because Damien is a local developer who truly cares."

The evidence of Verity aside, that may be the most accurate description of the former YBA we have heard for some time.