What a difference a year makes, says Florence Waters, as Damien Hirst plummets from the top of the art world’s power list to a modest 48th.

“Art cannot be speeded up,” said curator and gallerist Saleh Barakat at a talk at the British Museum this week about contemporary art from the Middle East.

He was speaking about how the world’s post 9/11 interest in the Arab world had sparked an acceleration of art production and buying in the Middle East. The inflated bubble of art created there, he said, needed time to distil itself; we might guess, but we can never know which artists will survive an art market fad.

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