Bloomberg’s Scott Reyburn takes a shot at the reputations of Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst by lining up some stats on falling sale volumes and prices for comparable works. But Reyburn really lets loose with some harsh quotes from some of the art world’s big winners in the Hirst and Koons sweepstakes. Among the 2008 works that sold for large numbers were Howard Rachofsky whose Balloon Flower made nearly £13m against a strong guarantee:

“We were in an extravagant period then,” Dallas-based collector Howard Rachofsky, who was the seller of that guaranteed piece, said in an interview. “It was a unique bubble market, a fantasy market. There were mega-billionaires from the Middle East and Russia interested in about eight names they were told to be interested in.”

Reyburn redeems Hirst’s market a bit with soothing words for buy-and-hold Hirst collectors from dealer Robert Sandelson and Fine Art Fund head Philip Hoffman:

“Hirst will come back,” Sandelson said of the U.K.’s richest artist. “In the short term, overproduction has been a problem. That didn’t harm the Andy Warhol market in the end. In the future Hirst’s works, like Warhol’s, will be bought as classics.”

“Hirst made his mark on art history,” said Hoffman. “But in 30 years’ time collectors are going to focus on the earlier works rather than the pieces he made when he had a lot of assistants. At the moment the prices of Hirst’s earlier works are probably unchanged. I’m not sure I’d invest in a new work that was sold in 2008.”

Koons, Hirst Prices Drop 50%; May Take Next Decade to Recover (Bloomberg)