Damien Hirst, the Art World's Shark Man, Is Still in the Swim

Local gallery owners say the appetite for contemporary art blossomed after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and Ukraine became independent. "Because of the U.S.S.R. we lost a century of contemporary art here," says Daryna Zholdak, who runs a downtown gallery.

Hirst's latest art is surprising -- oil paintings, a remarkably old-fashioned medium for a man best known as art's bad boy. It's almost as if Bill Gates turned to the abacus. Most of the new pictures feature ghostly white skulls floating on a blue-black background.

Why did Hirst turn to painting after his enormous success with sculpture and installations?

"A young artist can't be until the end of his life a young artist. If you don't change, you're lost," explains Schneider.

The crowd, though, seems to prefer Hirst's earlier work.

"I think the artist had too much black and blue paint around the house," says designer Anna Vasylkova, 22.

The reason Hirst's retrospective is in Ukraine comes down to one man. Pinchuk, an engineer with a doctorate in metallurgy, made his money in steel, banking and real estate. He took advantage of the breakup of the Soviet Union and used his connections (his marriage to the daughter of ex-president Leonid Kuchma) and a knack for making the right deal to expand his wealth to $2.6 billion, according to Forbes.

He has not hoarded all his money. He paid for free concerts in Kiev by Paul McCartney and Elton John, and he funds a number of philanthropic endeavors. He recently paid millions of dollars in ransom to free the Ukrainian crew of a freighter captured by Somali pirates. And, he is such a fan of Hirst that he even bought a share of the diamond-crusted platinum skull that the artist reportedly sold two years to a group of investors for a record $100 million -- though some doubt whether that much money changed hands.

Schneider, who helped direct the show, recalls when he first saw Hirst's work in the early '90s. Its importance was clear, Schneider says: For years, minimalist artists made huge opaque cubes, often painted a single color and devoid of any narrative. And Hirst, he says, took those cubes and converted them to glass. And, with a sense of mischief, he filled them with something that had a peculiar narrative: The death of the cow creates the life of a maggot that ends with the electrocution of the fly.

Not everyone at the Hirst show is convinced that Hirst is the genius others say he is. In one gallery, Dimitry Khutornoy, a 21-year-old designer, takes in a dead cow suspended from a rope, its entrails spilling onto a mirror strewn with money.

"You don't need too much brains to cut a cow," he says.

A burly, red-faced man stares for a quarter of an hour at the 16-foot shark's innards. As chattering students swirl past, Alexander Nastenko, 49, stands still.

"I was very curious to see this," says Nastenko, who explains that he spent 15 years in submarines and is now a diving instructor who has encountered smaller sharks in the Black Sea. "For me, I can hardly call it art. It's zoology."