THE ARTS:So what kind of art makes it into Damien Hirst's house? A new show exhibits some of the major acquisitions made possible by his own huge success, writes Mary Russell

When Damien Hirst heard that Francis Bacon had spent an hour in the Saatchi Gallery gazing at one of his works, entitled A Thousand Years, he thought the gallery people were exaggerating. Five minutes of the great man's time maybe, but one whole hour? But when he read a letter written by Bacon to Louis le Broquy - on display in the Hugh Lane Gallery here in Dublin - and realised it was true, his joy knew no bounds, though that is not exactly how it's put by Hirst who rarely deletes his expletives.

Now, in the exhibition, In the darkest hour there may be light, which shows some of Hirst's own collection, an oil painting by Bacon - A Study for a Figure at the Base of a Crucifixion - is the costliest exhibit, coming in at a cool $12 million (€9.25 million) and the one of which Hirst is most proud to own, according to Tom Coupe of the Serpentine Gallery in London, where the collection is being exhibited.

Painted in 1943/44, the Bacon has a strangely old-fashioned look to it, set as it is among artworks which include a waxen image of a dead whale, a mattress weeping blue blood, works by the graffiti artist Banksy and a larger-than-life representation of a half-peeled potato.

Death takes many shapes in this exhibition, its presence indicating Hirst's increasing preoccupation with mortality, brought about, he says, by the fact of having children, realising that time is moving and that there's not as much of it left as there used to be.

Many of the exhibits are payments in kind or swaps between fellow artists and friends, some of whom were at Goldsmiths College with him in the late 1980s - people such as Sarah Lucas, Tracey Emin and Angus Fairhurst. Some are works bought to support struggling young artists, while others are major acquisitions made possible by Hirst's own phenomenal success, the financial aspect of which he himself estimates to be in the region of £100 million (€151 million), which is how he comes to show Andy Warhol's Little Electric Chair, a glowering painting of an electric chair in which a murky red broods across the canvas and in which the word "little" of the title plays a major role.

CONCEPTUAL ART, OF course, has its critics, its followers and its plain puzzled. What does one make, for instance, of two women standing facing each other, silent, unmoving, regarding no one except an exhibit that lies at their feet. Are they communicating through the art work, displaying indifference to its presence, defying the viewer to engage?

When I circle the exhibit, one of the women suddenly raises a hand: I have come too close and must move back. She and her colleague are gallery attendants, there to protect Sarah Lucas's New Religion, an empty coffin whose outline shape is suggested by neon tubes of white light against a blue background.

And then there is the small box with a bit of electronic equipment inside it, which must be some sort of device for measuring the temperature of the gallery and which I don't even bother to cross the room to look at. But no, it's not. It's an exhibit called Mechanic, depicting tiny human figures on a treadmill.

This exhibition is an engaging one and, like good writing, will make you think rather than telling you what to think. The artists expose themselves through their work, inducing disgust, ridicule, horror or interest in parts that are far from equal. Banksy's Can't Beat the Feeling shows the well-known image of the young Vietnamese girl-child fleeing naked and screaming from a napalm attack, except that here she is running hand in hand with two iconic figures of US consumerism, Ronald MacDonald and Mickey Mouse, both of them smiling broadly.

Sarah Lucas's Chicken Knickers - a photographic montage showing, from the waist down, a young female with an oven-ready chicken, complete with gaping hole through which the stuffing is to be pushed, attached to her knickers - may seem too unsettling to contemplate, but then so is the violation of the female which so often is presented as a sexy and desirable act.

These are artworks which are universal and political, two attributes which characterise this exhibition.

Damien Hirst came to prominence with his tendency for cutting creatures in half and steeping them in formaldehyde. The most famous - or infamous, depending on your view - was the bisected cow with, on the far side of the room, her newborn calf.

If we accept that every act has a consequence, then the act of being born or of giving birth must resonate through our psyche whether we are aware of it or not, and it is this idea of loss, separation and isolation, with birth the first wrenching experience of all three which Hirst was, at that time, exploring. Or exorcising.

Interestingly, Hirst's mother crops up a lot in his writings and interviews. His whole collection, of which the Serpentine exhibition is only a part, is called murderme because, he says, his mother wouldn't let him call it buggerme. And it was she who put his new-found wealth in order by getting him a financial adviser.

Hirst is unembarrassed by money and seems to spend it judiciously. His studio, like Warhol's Factory, is available for impecunious artists to use. He has five in at the moment.

He also employs a staff of 100, some painting dots (the preoccupation again with isolation), others engaged on his current project which involves taking photographs of every pharmacist in London. Finally, there is the recent purchase of a large run-down manor house in Gloucestershire, which will house the whole of the murderme collection.

GERMAINE GREER WROTE recently in the Guardian of Kant's theory of the "unsynthesised manifold" which refers to everything in the world and beyond, whether we perceive it or not. To get to grips with all this, she says, particularly in relation to art, we must "enter the silent space created by the work". There are two exhibits in particular at the Serpentine which draw you into their silent orbit.

One is Michael Joo's God II, which depicts a person clothed in arctic wear lying frozen to death on a slab of ice, the flesh of the face long since gone and only the skeletal features visible through a thick covering of ice, as is the one hand from which a thick glove has fallen. Is this an arctic explorer or someone who got locked into the refrigerator room of a frozen foods factory?

The other exhibit, by John Isaacs and called The Incomplete History of Unknown Discovery, is a wax and expanding foam work showing the body of a whale cut up into sections - huge slabs of flesh modelled and worked so that they resemble a devastated landscape. At the base of one slab is the open eye of the whale, tiny pinpricks of its blood nestling like minute jewels in the folds of its creamy skin. In the pupil of the eye is a reflection of water that has long since ceased to move.

But it is the eye, looking through the viewer to a place beyond time, that brings this exhibition full circle, back to Hirst's concept of loss, to that moment of birth which is the beginning of eternity.

It would be foolish to take Damien Hirst too seriously, of course. After all, the man himself doesn't, and I have a newspaper cutting of him in the nip stuck on my fridge door, which means that every time I reach for the milk, I laugh.

Nevertheless, Hirst can do the business, and for anyone who wants to be challenged, a stroll into his danger zone will bring its own excitement.

• In the darkest hour there may be light: works from Damien Hirst's murderme collection (sponsored by Hiscox plc) is at London's Serpentine Gallery 10am-6pm daily until Jan 28. Admission free