Today's financial titans, rues the 55-year-old artist-in-residence at St John the Divine Cathedral in New York, are fed a contemporary art diet of sushi, monkeys and, for dessert, a horse named Tiramisu.

For instance, Steven Cohen, the founder of Connecticut-based hedge fund SAC Capital Advisors LLC, recently spent US$8 million (HK$62.4 million) on Damien Hirst's four-meter tiger shark pickled in formaldehyde. An anonymous corporate collector dropped US$5.6 million to possess Jeff Koons's porcelain sculpture of pop superstar Michael Jackson cuddling a chimpanzee named Bubbles. And an anonymous investor paid 600,000 (HK$8.71 million) to perhaps dangle Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan's stuffed racehorse in a harness, La Ballata di Trotsky, from his kitchen ceiling.

Wyatt says he prefers nudes. He also makes an excellent living forging eagles and representational bronze sculptures on display in more than 20 public spaces from New York to Beijing that can cost US$2.4 million.

Wyatt's trouble is the term ``representational.'' It comes with some mighty negative implications in a contemporary art market prone to rewarding perplexing fads, such as a Cattelan sculpture of a stuffed squirrel named Bidibidobidiboo committing suicide with a pistol at a kitchen table.

``Representational art is denounced by the art establishment,'' says Robert Fishko, the 61-year-old director of the Forum Gallery in New York.

The veteran Fifth Avenue gallery owner says the nasty breach between Wyatt's representationalists and the contemporary artists who command headlines results from an ``art world that's narrow, difficult to navigate, and wants at all costs to keep passengers on their road.''

In his catacomb studio beneath St John the Divine, the perfectly proportioned nude women Wyatt sculpts for clients such as hedge-fund guru Jim Rogers rarely require further clarification.

Walking down a frosty alley in the center of Florence, Italy, squeezed by both big-ticket galleries and the relentless marketing of what he calls stunt art on the auction-house block, is enough to make Wyatt laugh. He explores the Renaissance splendor that cascades up from the Arno River and into the Italian city whose wealthy merchant and banking families wrote the playbook on corporate investment in the arts.

``Look at the elegance,'' he marvels, stroking his white whiskers and pointing to Giambologna's Rape of the Sabines, a series of 16th-century Renaissance marble statues and a bronze relief of Roman legionnaires with buxom women slung over their shoulders.

It's centuries removed from The Virgin Mother, Hirst's 10.7-meter bronze of a pregnant dancer, skin ripped back, with her fetus bared and on display in the courtyard of Lever House in New York. Wyatt's world is more serene, a place where in 2003 real-estate tycoon Alex Parker came to commission a 227-kilogram bronze angel called The Price of Freedom for display at Arlington National Cemetery outside Washington.

Stanley Wells, the celebrated Shakespearian scholar and chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, also went to Wyatt's subterranean studio to spend more than US$1.5 million on eight statues based on the Bard's plays for permanent display in the gardens of Shakespeare's home in Stratford-Upon-Avon.

``I compare Wyatt to Rodin,'' Wells says. ``He's that good.''

``There's an historic argument over what's old-fashioned and what's modern,'' explains Wyatt, whose corporate commissions have included casting a Renaissance-inspired US$350,000 nude woman for Andrea Jung, chief executive of Avon Products; a 6.35-tonne bronze American eagle for the US State Department; and a three-tonne, US$250,000 bronze statue of JC Penney founder James Penney.

``I'm quite keen on Wyatt,'' says Rogers, who owns three of the artist's sculptures, including a 160kg bronze nude named Bathsheba. ``I consider myself a simple lad who buys things that he likes. If it happens to turn out to be an investment, then so be it. I don't follow the New York art market.'' Back in Renaissance Florence, Italy, Wyatt says the contemporary-art market has erected an artificial wall against a growing number of young painters and sculptors who he says have been critically penalized and left struggling to gain notoriety for abandoning ephemera in favor of renewing the skillful techniques of the representational masters. Indeed, Ivan Massow, chairman of London's Institute of Contemporary Arts, has referred to much of today's high-priced exotica as ``pretentious, self- indulgent, craftless art.''

According to Artnet AG - a Frankfurt-based analytics firm that tracks the trade in everything from US$10 Elvis Presley portraits on felt to Hirst's The Elusive Truth exhibition of US$2 million canvases that include paintings of pharmaceuticals and a sliced brain - the global art industry is a US$20 billion-a- year business. Wyatt says it's a market that has mostly jettisoned craftsmanship for gimmickry.

``Run your fingers along the gracefully detailed lines Giambologna brought to this sculpture,'' he urges. ``Could it just be that abstraction in art has become so abstract that there's no longer any shock or long-term investment value to it?''

Perhaps. Yet broaching those sorts of questions won't win an artist many patrons in a contemporary-art market dominated by painters and sculptors who leverage their hip downtown reputations to charge the uptown crowd US$2.7 million for the likes of Ninth Hour, Cattelan's statue of Pope John Paul II getting whacked in the head with a meteor.

``Contemporary art is a reflection of the thoughts and ideas of the time, now, the 21st century, and nobody wants to build or buy another bronze eagle,'' says Frances Dittmer, the former curator of the corporate Refco Collection and now a private consultant for wealthy businessmen and corporations seeking art investments.

``Representational art is great for a corporation that wants to commission a piece of commemorative art, but that's about stability and it's not about art, and it certainly has nothing to do with investment potential.''

During the 1990s, the collection owned by the privately held global trading firm Refco Inc. featured the works of 280 artists, including the highly valued ``retinal art'' of Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers, whose seminal piece is a sculpture of a giant casserole stuffed with mussels. The anthology also contained a Garnett Puett sculpture in reality made by 2,000 bees he released into a glass box fitted with a steel armature in the shape of a male head. After the swarm fashioned its honeycomb around the brace, Puett sucked the bees out with a vacuum cleaner.

``Art is about the idea, and once an artist has the idea, it can be painted or sculpted by anybody,'' Dittmer says. ``Bottom line: Greg Wyatt is not a hot artist, no one in the contemporary-art market has ever heard of him, and my guess is that he's a retrograde figurative artist that finds support through sufficient contacts to show his work in places like government buildings.''

Max Miller, a 24-year-old art student and representational sculptor from South Carolina now encamped in a Tuscan apartment block outside Florence, bristles at the contemporary buzz on Wyatt's work. Dressed in black and sporting a stud in each earlobe, Miller says, ``The artists I know are sick of Koons and Jackson Pollock clones.''

Along with some 300 students from around the world who attend Florence's three main Renaissance-art training grounds - the Charles H Cecil Studio, the Florence Academy of Art and the Michael John Angel Studios - Miller is part of a fresh coterie of art-world rebels. Many of them say they see mostly vinegar in the works of artists like the celebrated 42-year-old British sculptor Gary Hume, whose most recent Carnival exhibition at the Matthew Marks Gallery in New York features enameled and faceless bronze spheres stacked atop one another to resemble snowmen.

``The big-money art crowd in London and New York rarely wants to hear about great representational artists like Odd Nerdrum and John Sonsini because they think they're doing politically conservative art,'' Miller says. ``The Rape of the Sabines - the story of a bunch of naked guys who run into town and run off with a bunch of naked women - is about the most politically incorrect artwork in history. It's sculpture's ground-zero and the hardest art form to master,'' he adds.

``The problem we representationalists have is that political conservatives are more willing than others to admit that they don't see a big blue spike stuck in the ground as a monumental piece of investment art.''

Huddled in a cold, dusty and crumbling 16th-century church that doubles as their studio and ersatz gallery, Miller and his fellow artists argue that corporate art buyers have allowed hype to supplant talent.

``Successful artists must be better at selling themselves than creating good work,'' says Chris Eastland, a 25-year-old representational painter and sculptor from Fairfield, Connecticut. ``The art critics and analysts who define taste are all in their 40s, 50s and 60s. They were brought up to believe that modernism is the norm and guys like Wyatt are useless throwbacks.''

The avatars of contemporary art, Eastland suggests, can concoct a rationale for anything.

``Learning how to draw and master the brush, the chisel and the crucible like the Renaissance masters teaches accountability,'' Miller says. ``Besides,'' he adds with a laugh, ``we'll always have work. Someone has to fix those statues once they've been eaten away by pigeon droppings.''

Wyatt says he doesn't mind being part of an art underworld that includes animal sculptor Kent Ullberg, human figurist Anthony Padovano and Fred Hart, the representationalist who designed and cast the bronze soldiers that stand alongside the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington.

David Heleniak, a senior partner at Shearman & Sterling, a New York-based law firm with offices in 19 cities around the globe, owns a commissioned Wyatt watercolor and says the view from below looks pretty good to him.

``Wyatt is an artist of the time when artists were master craftsmen,'' the 59-year-old Heleniak says. ``I'm not an art investor, but if I was, I would be buying Wyatts. His studio beneath St John the Divine is enthralling and reminds me of the castle scene from the movie Young Frankenstein.''

Still, after more than 30 years of fulfilling dozens of corporate commissions and 23 years chiseling lumps of marble into angels and demons and peacocks beneath the foundations of the largest cathedral in the US, Wyatt's work has failed to cull the interest of any a la mode gallery or museum.

At the same time, public gardens in New York and Washington are awash with Wyatt statues that can weigh as much as 13.6 tonnes. He's also made long-term loans to US Senate majority leader Bill Frist, New York Governor George Pataki and the US House of Representatives Intelligence Committee.

Fishko says Wyatt's lack of marquee gallery glamour is hardly surprising in a secretive and clubby market defined by extremes and populated by trendy folks who would pay no attention to the Bill of Rights Eagle sculpture Wyatt has planted outside President John F Kennedy's dormitory at Harvard University or to his recent exhibition of nudes at the US Consulate in Florence.

``Honorific art is not traded on any market,'' Fishko explains. ``What galleries display is created at risk by the artist, and a corporation would never come speak with me to commission any of the artists I represent because the executives who want honorific work don't want to take any risk at all. Wyatt knows his work is sold before he starts.''

Says Anthony Grant, former head of the contemporary art department at Sotheby's and now owner of the Anthony Grant Gallery in New York: ``There's now a swing back towards representational and figurative art.

``At the end of the day people like looking at recognized images.''