Sometimes it's really hard to take the art world seriously. Sometimes, in particular, it is really hard to take Damien Hirst at all.

Just in time for the art world hordes that arrive in London this week, Hirst has revealed For the Love of God, a $100 million diamond-encrusted skull at the White Cube gallery in London -- the most expensive artwork to be proffered, announced, and most likely imminently sold by a living artist. Viewing of the tricked-out tchotchke with a mega 52.4-carat pink diamond smack dab in the middle of its forehead is by ticket only, and apparently sold out. Commodity art, indeed.

A few years ago, I wrote an article for ARTnews identifying the top ten most-expensive-living artists. It was a nearly impossible task considering that (at the time, at least) privately paid prices weren't openly -- or at least not regularly -- discussed. In the article, I explained that the artists in the piece were considered based on the sum paid for a single work of art at auction or privately (private sums can and often do exceed an artist's record at auction), regardless of how many works have sold at that level, the production costs involved in creating the work, or how prices for new works measured up.

Hirst didn't make the list -- The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, his14-foot tiger shark in formaldehyde, hadn't yet sold for somewhere in the neighborhood of $8 million to hedge-fund billionaire Steven Cohen. (Having recently substituted a new shark for the badly deteriorating original perhaps the sculpture should be renamed The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Replaced Because He Was Decomposing.)

Look for Sotheby's to upend Hirst's $7.43 million auction record set for Lullaby Winter at Christie's last month when it offers Lullaby Spring, a cabinet full of candy-colored pills, in its London salesroom this Thursday (estimate: $6-8 million).

Still, it's a bit unfair to compare market prices for an oil-on-canvas number painting by Jasper Johns to a large-scale investment-grade Celebration sculpture by Jeff Koons. Part of the wow-factor involved when an artwork sells for eight or nine figures is the fact that someone out there parted with that much cash for an object that, when you break it down, is composed of rather ordinary materials. It may be perverse, but there's a sense of magic in that.

Affixing 8,601 diamonds (apparently ethically acquired ones) to a platinum cast of an 18th-century skull reeks of a rather sophomoric attempt at piracy. Hirst recently told Reuters, "I've stopped worrying about what art is."

His confusion is apparent. Memento mori or not, when you break it down, For the Love of God is jewelry.

-- KELLY DEVINE THOMAS