Damien Hirst in front of one of his butterfly canvases, part of his retrospective at Tate Modern. Photograph: Ray Tang/Rex Features

He has his detractors (is he an artist or merely a shrewd entrepreneur?), but anyone who gives butterflies their due gets our attention:

Butterflies made Damien Hirst’s career and this is how he repays them: in a stark, white, windowless room in Tate Modern, hundreds of insects pull themselves from their pupae only to die there a few days later, surrounded by gawping tourists.

For some visitors to Hirst’s blockbuster retrospective, it is not the rotting cow’s head surrounded by flies, the sheep in formaldehyde or the giant ashtray filled with cigarette butts that makes them feel queasy. It is the installation in Room 5, where tropical butterflies futilely flit around the boxy space, eventually falling to die on the floor, where they are promptly scooped up by security staff.

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