Oh, now he's going to be impossible to live with.

Damien Hirst, enfant terrible, became the most expensive living artist at auction last week (unlike with Peter Doig note the absence of a European modifier). With Larry Gagosian, Jay Jopling, and a diamond-studded $100 million skull in his corner, it almost makes one want to shout foul.

But there's no arguing with records. They are what they are. People set them. People break them -- breathtakingly quickly nowadays. Since the dawn of artistry, artists have succeeded in the market because of the patrons in their corner. In this case, patronage helped the 42-year-old figurehead of the Young British Artists dethrone American iconoclast Jasper Johns, 77, who'd held the record at auction for a living artist since 1989 when publisher S.I. Newhouse paid $17.1 million for the artist's False Start (1959). (This record was improved upon in May when Gagosian paid $17.4 million for Johns's Figure 4 (1959) at Christie's.) Newhouse subsequently sold False Start to entertainment mogul David Geffen, who sold it last year to hedge-fund manager Kenneth Griffin for a reported $80 million.

Modern-day patronage also helped Hirst trump the most-expensive-living-European-artist-at-auction record set by the 84-year-old School of London painter Lucian Freud, grandson of Sigmund Freud and portraitist of the Queen, when his depiction of the late Bruce Bernard sold for 7.86 million pounds ($15.6 million) at Christie's the night before.

Lullaby Spring, the work that reset the contemporary art world when it fetched 9.6 million pounds ($19.2 million) at Sotheby's London on June 21, is one of four pill cabinets belonging to Hirst's take on that allegorical mainstay, the Four Seasons. The stainless steel cabinet contains 6,136 Easter-hued pharmaceuticals (unlike the 8,601 diamonds used for his high-security skull, the pills are hand-painted bronze placebos). In May, its more despondent counterpart, Lullaby Winter, summoned a record $7.4 million at Christie's.

Despite Hirst's coup, it was Freud's late buddy Francis Bacon who was the undisputed star of the recent auction sales of Impressionist & Modern and Contemporary & Postwar art in New York and London, which fetched nearly $2.5 billion altogether at Christie's, Sotheby's, and Phillips de Pury, including day sales.

Two paintings by Bacon alone racked up nearly $100 million in May and June. Bacon's 1978 Self Portrait (at right) fetched 21.58 pounds ($43 million) last week, the second highest price for the artist. His Study from Innocent X (1962) set a $52.6 million record at Sotheby's in New York just last month. All of which makes one wonder about Venice Biennale director Robert Storr's recent observation, "'Money talks but generally, when it comes to art's substance, it doesn't have much to say."' Maybe, but it sure does move it.

-- KELLY DEVINE THOMAS