After one implausible fake of an unknown pharaoh’s portrait, I was disgusted. Here, the kitsch doesn’t so much grow on you as wrap you in its tentacles and drag you down into its underwater palace. Hirst’s hero Koons has done something like it with his giant reflective balloon dogs.

It takes a kind of genius to push kitsch to the point where it becomes sublime. Is this going to be any more artistically rewarding than a trip to the Harry Potter studios to see the sorting hat? But Hirst’s wizardry proves to be the real thing. Instead, the display at Punta della Dogana starts with a gargantuan fake Aztec sun stone that frankly looks like a prop from an Indiana Jones film. Photographs and films of the salvage project Hirst’s team carried out in the Indian Ocean make you hope for an underwater exhibition or a boat ride through a sunken world. Photograph: Miguel Medina/AFP/Getty Images

Its unique cargo of global artefacts, assembled by a freed slave called Cif Amotan II, have spent two millennia undergoing a “sea change” straight out of Shakespeare’s Tempest, becoming wrapped in coloured corals and bizarre crustacean growths - until the archaeologists who found this sunken marvel asked Hirst to use his millions to help recover it.Ĭalendar Stone by Damien Hirst. In 2008 the wreck of a treasure ship called the Apistos (meaning “the Unbelievable”) was found on the seabed off east Africa. Hirst claims a new role, that of archaeological impresario, presenting to the world one of the most important discoveries of recent times. Not that he is taking credit for the Egyptian statues, Greek armour, Chinese bells, unicorns, medusas and other wonders that unfold in ever more mind-boggling richness and strangeness as you explore what amounts to an entire museum of ancient history and myth. The young artist who put a tiger shark in a glass tank never died, after all, and we who lost faith in him look like fools for failing to believe.

Fishdom find treasure in grotto