NEW YORK—Australian art critic Robert Hughes has gone after Damien Hirst's artwork, calling Hirst's pieces "absurd" and "tacky commodities," reports the Telegraph.

The criticism is part of a Channel 4 documentary about art and money called The Mona Lisa Curse, to be aired on September 21. It recounts Hughes's thoughts after 50 years of living in New York and reviewing art.

According to Hughes, works of art are now akin to film stars, a process that began in 1962 when the Mona Lisa went on display in New York and long lines to see it turned the masterpiece into a spectacle. The critic goes on to say that "art as spectacle loses its meaning" and that expensive, commercial pieces are the cause of that loss. Hirst's work is a prime example of this phenomenon, he says.

He calls it a "little miracle" that Hirst's 35-foot statue Virgin Mother could be worth £5 million ($8.8 million) despite being made by someone "with so little facility." The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, the British artist's formaldehyde tiger shark, is a "tacky commodity" and "the world's most overrated marine organism."

Hughes has publicly denounced Hirst's work in the past. At the Royal Academy of Art's annual dinner four years ago, he said: "A string of brush marks on a lace collar in Velazquez can be as radical as a shark that an Australian caught for a couple of Englishman some years ago and is now murkily disintegrating in its tank on the other side of the Thames."