Sotheby’s is full of bling. Diamonds twinkle next to iridescent butterflies. Spots dance before the eyes. Spin-painted Day-Glo skulls dazzle from the walls. Dead animals with golden accessories stare out from tanks.

The Damien Hirsts on show are undoubtedly fun, but the mood among the viewers is not uniformly sparkly. “Did he actually paint that?” one man is saying, looking at a picture of a skull on an armchair. “Of course not,” says his companion. “Hirst can’t paint.”

That was on Friday, before the critic Robert Hughes described Mr. Hirst’s work as “absurd” and “tacky.” On Tuesday, the skeptics were again out in force. I ask an American collector if he will be bidding. “Old Masters will hold their value, but these no … .”

Their creator, dressed all in black except for some diamanté skulls on his T-shirt, might well be nervous. Sotheby’s is expecting to sell the 223 lots for about $114 million. If they don’t sell well — and Mr. Hirst says there are no reserves — this will be the moment when not paint but egg hits the spin-wheel of Mr. Hirst’s celebrity. “I have had nightmares. I imagine it going: ‘Lot 9 — no bids. Lot 10 — still no bids?'” he says. “But, whether it works or not cash-wise, the door will stay open.”

He means that there is no turning back from the precedent he has created by putting new work straight into auction. No longer will artists have to see half of their earnings go to what he calls the “snooty” types who run galleries. But some say that his motives are not so high-minded: that it’s all about making money.

With Toddington Manor, his 300-room mansion in the Cotswolds, to convert into an art gallery, Mr. Hirst could be feeling the pinch. Recently, he took a large stake in his unsold $87.7 million diamond-encrusted skull, because he says he didn’t want to sell it to someone who would hide it away in a vault. Jay Jopling is said to have a stockpile of 200 Hirsts at the White Cube gallery. “Total nonsense,” he says. “Only six. We’re having the best time ever.” To add to this bullish impression, Mr. Hirst’s manager, Frank Dunphy, recently upped the estimate of Mr. Hirst’s personal fortune to $1 billion, making him by far Britain’s richest living artist.

Even his detractors anticipate that his big pickled animals, including “The Golden Calf,” will fetch good prices. The ones that may bomb are the spot, butterfly, and spin paintings, produced by armies of assistants. To reassure buyers, he says he’s stopped making the butterflies, which number 400, and that there will be no more spin paintings — only the 300 in existence. He is moving all his assistants on to spot pictures, of which there are already 700. “They never stop moving. They never bore you.”

Maybe, but are they art? “I don’t know what art is. If it’s on the wall at Sotheby’s by definition it is art.” That’s a bit glib. He tries again. “There has only ever been one idea in art, and that is to communicate what it is like to be alive today.” How does that relate to, say, the spin paintings? “The world spins. The molecules in our bodies spin. There’s a fear of things standing still. And they look great. All I wanted was to make paintings that had the same impact as the spin painting I used to make at the summer fête at school.”

Exactly. Some would say a child could do them. “When Picasso put eyes on the side of people’s heads, they said a child could do that. They said it about Rembrandt, too.”

Will his work one day be considered great art, too? “I wouldn’t make them if I didn’t think they were. I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed in the morning. But somewhere at the back of your mind you do think: I’m not worthy.”

It’s hard not to warm to Mr. Hirst because he is funny and frank. Although he says he would be more worried if people like Mr. Hughes ignored his work, instead of attacking it, the carping over the way he delegates the making of his work clearly hurts.

“There’s a core of people stuck in the mud with an idealized image of art that died about 2,000 years ago,” he says, talking at top speed. “To make art at the level I need to make it, I need to employ other people. I made five spot paintings, then I employed other people to do them. But every single one is exactly what I want it to be. Prada doesn’t make his own clothes, Frank Gehry doesn’t build his own buildings, and no one throws s— at them.

“I’m designing everything to a very high level, and nothing leaves the studio until it’s exactly what I want. Are you going to pay more for a painting because the artist actually ground the paints? How far are you going to take it?

“I could do a drawing, but it’s completely different from what I want to do. It’s not like I’m trying to give you a part of myself in the traditional way. I want people to go, ‘Wow.’ I don’t want them to see the workings of my mind.”

Perhaps that’s what lies at the heart of distrust of Mr. Hirst. He provides a glossy surface but hints at what he is feeling through animals and objects. His twin obsessions are glitz and the fear of death. Everything is about combining those two factors.

The boy who never knew his father and who was brought up in poverty in Leeds by his mother can’t quite believe how far the combination of simple ideas and high-quality execution have taken him. Twenty years ago, while still a student at Goldsmiths, he staged “Freeze,” the show which launched the Young British Artists, or YBAs, and he wasn’t even the star of the show. Now he sells all over the world.

“It’s crazy really. How did it happen? I remember being very young and worrying about the electricity bill, seeing how upset it made my mother. Maybe I was too young to have to deal with that, but maybe it also made me what I am today. When I see a book of my work next to one by David Hockney, I think it’s a dream.”

He’s at the head of an art empire, with workshops and a publishing arm, and he owns a large collection of Contemporary works, plus a Masaccio and a few other Old Masters. Other artists like him because he buys their work, and subsidizes their books. He is also paternal toward his army of employees and gives generously to charities. But he still seems curiously vulnerable. “I get comfort from things that are old,” he said.

As he grows older, he says the fear of death grows worse. Attempts to stare it in the face and decorate it haven’t alleviated the fear of being snuffed out any minute. Always mindful that his time could be up, he worries that he’s so busy that he doesn’t see enough of his three children, aged 13, 8, and 3. But he can buy them the things he never had — such as a Francis Bacon in the playroom.

With the proceeds of the Sotheby’s auction he may be able to buy a few more treasures.