Back then, visitors complained of feeling unwelcome to linger over the installation because of the presence of firearms. It was a strange complaint, given the presence of trigger-happy LAPD officers on almost every Angelean street corner, but one that created an international outcry all the same.

The museum, for its part, was anxious to prevent a repeat of an incident which occurred in 1994, when artist Mark Bridger poured black ink into the animal's tank at the Serpentine Gallery in London, re-labelling it: "black sheep."

Anyway, the hoo-hah is now finally over. LACMA – as the gallery is called – has admitted defeat, and those Colt 45s have disappeared from its enormous premises, which stretch for almost half a mile along Wilshire Boulevard.

As for Hirst's work, it now seems strangely out of place. The USA was built on beef-burgers, cowboys and McDonalds – so people don't really know what to make of a sheep. Ditto his medicine cabinets, in a country where ambulance men swipe your credit card before carting you off to hospital.

Even LACMA's amazing Hirst butterfly painting, of three gothic stained-glass windows, carries none of its usual brooding menace, when looked at through the prism of this devotedly Christian society.

Damien Hirst is still a creative genius, of course. But in California that somehow doesn't prevent him feeling as if he's just another Brit abroad.

(Photo: REUTERS/Fred Prouser)