He rarely gives interviews, but a new book offers an intriguing insight into what drives the enigmatic collector’s passion for art

You’ve been successful at discovering new artistic talent. But are there not always great artists who go undiscovered?

By and large, talent is in such short supply that mediocrity can be taken for brilliance rather more than genius can go undiscovered.

You have been described both as a “super-collector” and as “the most successful art dealer of our times”. Looking back on the past 20 years, how would you characterise your activities?

Who cares what I’m described as? Art collectors are pretty insignificant in the scheme of things. What matters and survives is the art. I buy art that I like. I buy it to show it off in exhibitions. Then, if I feel like it, I sell it and buy more art. As I have been doing this for 30 years, I think most people in the art world get the idea by now. It doesn’t mean I’ve changed my mind about the art that I end up selling. It just means that I don’t want to hoard everything for ever.

Your practice of buying emerging artists’ work has proved highly contagious and is arguably the single greatest influence on the current market because so many others, both veteran collectors and new investors, are following your lead, vying to snap up the work of young, relatively unknown artists. Do you accept that you are responsible for much of the speculative nature of the contemporary art market?

I hope so. Artists need a lot of collectors, all kinds of collectors, buying their art.

Do you think you have messed up anybody’s life by flogging off all their work?

I don’t buy art just to make artists happy any more than I want to make them sad if I sell their work. Don’t you think you’re being a bit melodramatic?

Before you went into advertising, what other career did you consider?

“Consider” isn’t quite how it was. At 17 and with two O-levels to show after a couple of attempts, a career path wasn’t realistic, nor a chat with the Christ’s College careers officer, who wouldn’t have recognised me in any event as my absenteeism record was unrivalled. I answered a situations vacant ad in the Evening Standard for a voucher clerk, pay £10 weekly. It was in a tiny advertising agency in Covent Garden, and a voucher clerk had to traipse round all the local newspaper offices in Fleet Street – of which there were hundreds at the time – and pick up back copies of papers in which the agency’s clients had an advert appearing. The voucher clerk’s role was to get the newspaper, find the ad, stick a sticker on it so the client could verify its appearance, and the agency could get paid. Vital work, obviously. One of the advantages of it being a tiny agency was that one day they got desperate when their creative department (one young man) was off sick, and they asked me if I could try and make up an ad for one of their clients, Thornber Chicks. This ad was to appear in Farmer and Stock-Breeder magazine, and hoped to persuade farmers to choose Thornbers, as their chicks would grow to provide many cheap, superior quality eggs and a fine return. I didn’t know how you wrote an ad, or indeed how to write anything much other than “I will not be late for assembly”, for which I had been provided much practice. So I looked through copies of Farmer and Stock-Breeder and Poultry World, chose some inspiring-sounding words and phrases, cobbled them together, stuck on a headline – I think I stole it from an old American advertisement – and produced “Ask the man who owns them” as a testimonial campaign featuring beaming Thornber farmers. The client bought it.

Does a love of art, particularly Renaissance art on a biblical theme, make one feel closer to God?

I believe God must be very disappointed in his handiwork. Mankind has clearly failed to evolve much in all these years; we’re still as cretinous and barbaric as we were many centuries ago, and poor God must spend all day shaking his head at our vileness and general ineptitude. Or perhaps, we might just give him a good laugh. But of course, I hope God likes our art enough to forgive us our sins, particularly mine.

I like the new gallery but hated your gallery in County Hall. What were you thinking!

I was stupid, stupid, stupid. I got bored with knowing my first gallery in Boundary Road too well, so well in fact that I could hang my shows to the centimetre while sitting on a deckchair in Margate. Plus, I wanted to introduce new art to as wide a public as possible, and I went for somewhere with a much bigger footfall on the South Bank next to the London Eye. So I gave up the airy lightness of Boundary Road for small oak-panelled rooms, and nobody liked it. I saw it as a challenge, but one which I clearly wasn’t up to.

Which artists do you display in your own home? Are you constantly changing the works you have there? Is there a core of favourites which stay there?

My house is a mess, but any day now we’ll get round to hanging some of the stacks of pictures sitting on the floor.

Who are the artists you are most pleased with discovering?

Over the years I have been very lucky to see some great artists’ work just at the start of their careers, so that I could feel “pleased with discovering” them. However, I have also “discovered” countless artists who nobody but me seemed to care much for and whose careers have progressed very slowly, if at all. So I certainly don’t have an infallible gift for spotting winners. I think it’s fair to say that I bought Cindy Sherman in her first exhibition in a group show, with some of her black-and-white film stills framed together in those days as a collage of 10 images, and went on to buy much of her work for the next few years. I bought most of the work from Jeff Koons’s first exhibition in a small and now-defunct artist-run gallery in New York’s East Village, which included the basketballs floating in glass aquariums and the Hoovers and other appliances in fluorescent-lit vitrines. But this is getting too self-congratulatory and the truth is I miss out on just as many good artists as I home in on.

Are paintings a better investment than sharks in formaldehyde? The Hirst shark looks much more shrivelled now than it used to, but a Peter Doig canvas will still look great in 10 years and will be much easier to restore.

There are no rules about investment. Sharks can be good. Artists’ dung can be good. Oil on canvas can be good. There’s a squad of conservators out there to look after anything an artist decides is art.

Why do overseas museums have better collections of Britart than the Tate?

Because the Tate curators didn’t know what they were looking at during the early 1990s, when even the piddliest budget would have bought you many great works. But I’m no better. I regularly find myself waking up to art I passed by or simply ignored.

Looking ahead, in 100 years’ time, how do you think British art of the early 21st century will be regarded? Who are the great artists who will pass the test of time?

General art books dated 2105 will be as brutal about editing the late 20th century as they are about almost all other centuries. Every artist other than Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Donald Judd and Damien Hirst will be a footnote.

If you were commissioning your own portrait, in which medium would you choose to be represented?

I’d rather eat the canvas than have someone paint me on it.

Do you ever do the cooking?

I can do eggs. And cornflakes.

Should the country be spending money on saving old masters for the nation, or buying up works by the next generation of artists?

At the risk of being lynched – again – by the art crowd, I don’t think there is a great need any more to save paintings for the nation at the cost of supporting new art. What difference does it make if a Titian is hanging in the National Gallery, the Louvre or the Uffizi? This isn’t the 18th century: people travel, so there’s no need to be nationalistic about the world’s art treasures. Much more important is to back living artists.

What is your favourite museum in the world?

The Prado in Madrid. I have a weakness for Goya, but the museum itself is so unfussy, and clearly loves to display its many masterpieces as unshowily as possible, each visit reinforces my belief in the enduring importance of art.

I know very little about contemporary art but have £1,000 to invest. Any advice?

Premium bonds. Art is no investment unless you get very, very lucky, and can beat the professionals at their game. Just buy something you really like that will give you a thousand pounds’ worth of pleasure over the years. And take your time looking for something really special, because looking is half the fun.

What is your proudest achievement?

I don’t do pride. That’s not to say I don’t have an ego the size of an aircraft hangar, but I’m not even very proud of that.

How much money have you lost in the recession?

I daren’t look.

Aren’t those dot paintings [by Damien Hirst] just like wallpaper?

You may as well say that Rothko paintings look like nice rugs. There’s no crime in art being decorative.

With Mark Rothko’s paintings, people say that they evoke “infinity”. Do you see it this way?

My understanding of infinity goes something like this: every 100 years a sparrow flies to the top of a large mountain, and cleans its beak by scraping it on the highest rock. By the time the mountain has been scraped away to a small pile of dust, that would be the equivalent of the first second of infinity. I thought of that the last time I stood in front of a Rothko and neither felt an overwhelming sense of infinity, nor had a mystical experience of any kind. Maybe I’ve just seen too many Rothkos and they don’t pulsate with ethereal splendour for me anymore. Or perhaps I never quite got the wonder of Rothko.

Was “Sensation” your high point and have you been going backwards since?

Well, it is never nice to be told your best days are behind you. But you’re probably right. I certainly was more dynamic once, building my advertising business and my art collection with ferocious energy. Now that I have fizzled out, I still enjoy putting on shows of art that I like and introducing new artists to our visitors, so I hope it makes it worthwhile to plod on.

Of the contemporary artists who died young – Jean Michel Basquiat, Eva Hesse, Felix Gonzalez-Torres – who do you think would have achieved long-term greatness?

Without being too callous, many artists achieve iconic status by dying before their work has a chance to dwindle into stale repetition. So Pollock is revered for his masterpieces, and we will never see what he might have produced had he continued making art for another 30 years. I have never really loved Basquiat’s work, even though I was taken down to dealer Annina Nosei’s basement where she had this young boy painting away there, telling everyone who’d listen that in young Basquiat she’d found a genius and for only $500 a picture. Silly me, I found it all derivative and decorative, so that shows how much my taste can be trusted. Eva Hesse was fantastic. Felix Gonzalez-Torres was less so. Forgive my tackiness, but my favourite dead-artist-who-could-have-been-a-contender was Scott Burton. He did get a bit of recognition in the late 1970s with his quirky take on furniture as sculpture, and vice versa, and with his “rock chairs” formed by two sheer cuts into a boulder. Today he seems largely forgotten, except by a handful of fans who were around at the time, and it’s quite rare to see him in surveys of key American artists. But that’s what he was.

Can you paint or draw yourself?

Not even a little bit.

Who is the next big artist?

That’s what the TV show will discover, we’re hoping.

The Big Question – What do you think of the art world?

David Sylvester [the late critic] and I used to play a silly little game. We used to ask ourselves, which of the following – artist, curator, dealer, collector or critic – we would least like to be stranded with on a desert island for a few years. Of course, we could easily bring to mind a repellent example in each category, and it made the selection ever-changing, depending on who we ran into that bored us most the previous week. Anyway, we pretty much agreed on the following:

Dealers

An occupational hazard of some of my art collector friends’ infatuation with art is their encounters with a certain type of art dealer. Pompous, power-hungry and patronising, these doyens of good taste would seem to be better suited to manning the door of a night club, approving who will be allowed through the velvet ropes. Their behaviour alienates many fledgling collectors from any real involvement with the artist’s vision. These dealers like to feel that they “control” the market. But, of course, by definition, once an artist has a vibrant market, it can’t be controlled. For example, one prominent New York dealer recently said that he disapproved of the strong auction results, because it allowed collectors to jump the queue of his ‘waiting list’. So instead of celebrating an artist’s economic success, they feel castrated by any loss to their power base. And then there are visionary dealers, without whom many great artists of our century would have slipped by unheralded.

Critics

The art critics on some of Britain’s newspapers could as easily have been assigned gardening or travel and been cheerfully employed for life. This is because many newspaper editors don’t themselves have much time to study their “Review” section, or have much interest in art. So we now enjoy the spectacle of critics swooning with delight about an artist’s work when its respectability has been confirmed by consensus and a top-drawer show – the same artist’s work that 10 years earlier they ignored or ridiculed. They must live in dread of some mean sod bringing out their old cuttings. And when Matthew Collings, pin-up boy of TV art commentary, states that the loss of contemporary art in the Momart fire didn’t matter all that much – ‘these young artists can always produce more’ – he tells you all you need to know about the perverse nature of some of those who mug a living as art critics. However, when a critic knows what she or he is looking at and writes revealingly about it, it’s sublime.

Note: Since writing this I have got to know Matthew Collings a little and like him a lot. So I wish I had picked on one of our other distinguished art critics to moan about.

Curators

With very few exceptions, the big-name globe-trotting international mega-event curators are too prone to curate clutching their PC guidebook in one hand and their Bluffer’s Notes on art theory in the other. They seem to deliver the same type of Groundhog Day show, for the approval of 250 or so like-minded devotees. These dead-eyed, soulless exhibitions dominate the art landscape with their sociopolitical pretensions. The familiar grind of 1970s conceptualist retreads, the dry-as-dust photo and text panels, the production line of banal and impenetrable installations, the hushed and darkened rooms with their interchangeable flickering videos are the hallmarks of a decade of numbing right-on curatordom. The fact that in the last 10 years only five of the 40 Turner Prize nominees have been painters tells you more about curators than about the state of painting today. But when you see something special, something inspired, you realise the debt we owe great curators and their unforgettable shows – literally unforgettable, because you remember every picture, every wall and every juxtaposition.

Note: Since writing this there have been 16 more Turner Prize nominees, of whom two have been painters.

Artists

If you study a great work of art, you’ll probably find the artist was a kind of genius. And geniuses are different to you and me. So let’s have no talk of temperamental, self-absorbed and petulant babies. Being a good artist is the toughest job you could pick, and you have to be a little nuts to take it on. I love them all.

Collectors

However suspect their motivation, however social-climbing their agenda, however vacuous their interest in decorating their walls, I am beguiled by the fact that rich folk everywhere now choose to collect contemporary art rather than racehorses, vintage cars, jewellery or yachts. Without them, the art world would be run by the state, in a utopian world of apparatchik-approved, culture ministry-sanctioned art. So if I had to choose between Mr and Mrs Goldfarb’s choice of art or some bureaucrat who would otherwise be producing Vat forms, I’ll take the Goldfarbs. Anyway, some collectors I’ve met are just plain delightful, bounding with enough energy and enthusiasm to brighten your day.

There’s no point in museums being free if the cost of special exhibitions is prohibitively and unnecessarily expensive.

It’s lovely to stroll around our museums for free. Not so nice to find that, once you have been sucked in with no admission charge, the exhibition you want to see costs a tenner or more to enter. It’s irritating for the visitor, and perplexing.

Are museums being elitist, and feel that only people who are prepared to pay the £10, £12 or £14 admission fee are worthy of seeing shows by their selected artists?

No, no, museum directors would argue, we have to charge for admission to exhibitions in order to finance the running costs of the museum, the transportation and insurance of the exhibited works, the cost of installing the show and so on.

But even London’s leading museums, admirable in so many ways, only earn about 7% of their annual costs from ticket sales – the rest being provided by the public purse, and sponsorship. For example one of the museums I love visiting, the Tate, raises just £6.9m from admission charges across all four of its galleries, set against its running costs of £98.5m.

Why bother fleecing the public for such a piddling contribution when the taxpayer is already funding the great bulk of your costs? It’s simply double taxation on paying visitors.

I may not know much about finance, with a Fail in GCSE maths, but I do know that attendance at our own gallery could drop by 50% if we charged admission. Perhaps this is because our audience is often young, and not always affluent. Being free-entry for all exhibitions has allowed us to offer five of the six most-visited shows in London over the last two years, according to the Art Newspaper’s survey of museum attendance.

I may be a full-blown egocentric, and deeply self-serving, but I do not believe that this is because people flock to share my taste in art. Neither do I believe that more people are interested in seeing our shows of new art from India, or the Middle East, or Germany, or even the UK, than they are seeing a Rothko retrospective at the Tate Modern. Or Picasso at the National Gallery. Or David Hockney at the National Portrait Gallery. We attract many visitors because people don’t wish to fork out the whacking entry charges to these important shows. It is a generally held view that had these spectacular exhibitions been free, attendance would have probably quadrupled.

If, for example, the Rothko retrospective had open admission, sales of catalogues, posters, keyrings, notepads, calendars, tea towels and other knick-knacks, would surely have doubled, tripled, or even quadrupled – there is a good chance that the income produced could have been as great as that raised by charging for entry. It’s an estimate that is shared by a number of managers of the vast retail outlets at our leading museums.

It may also be true that if museums weren’t featherbedded by state funding, and instead focused on maximising their public appeal, they would discover income from sponsors would be easier to attract. Sponsors like to back popular, well-attended exhibitions; the promotional budgets they hand over to museums then offer greater, more tangible value.

Of course one of the drawbacks of heavily attended exhibitions is that visitors feel short-changed by the crowds; the experience of viewing a big-name show is often unpleasant, claustrophobic, and destroys any hope of experiencing the works in any thoughtful way.

Museums would find that if they stay open until 10pm, a lot of overcrowding evaporates and people are able to enjoy the works at times that suit them; we use after-hours to give our 500,000 gallery members, Facebook and Twitter followers, their own late nights.

The worst of all museum sins, in my view, is to charge schools for their pupils to see their shows. From our own experiences, state schools have no budget to pay for their students’ entry. Only private schools can manage it, often by asking parents to cover the cost of school trips.

The Tate’s standard rate for school pupils is £5 a head for groups of 10 or more, and the National Portrait Gallery charges £9 a head for pupils in groups of 20.

I’m not trying to pick a fight with the Art Gods. I simply think something got screwed up with a policy of keeping museums free – and then frustrating visitors by charging them for entry to the shows they most wish to see.

I like to think that museum directors are not elitist, would like to attract the widest possible audience and are up to the challenge of managing their museum’s affairs so that the widest number of us can benefit. Of course I could be wrong; perhaps they are just snooty types, who don’t want a lot of riffraff around. Or, worse, they could be so removed from reality that they can’t quite follow that £20 is a bit much even for a professional couple to part with every time they want to take in a show.

If we share some of Turner’s work, we could create a world-beating collection of 20th-century art.

JMW Turner bequeathed 300 of his masterpieces to the nation, alongside 30,000 of his watercolours, drawings and sketches. Clearly, only a small proportion of his work can be installed in its home at the Tate, and so most of it is never seen by the public, but safely stored away in silent darkness.

I wonder how Turner would feel now, in an age of mass travel and mass communication, to have his work squirreled away, inaccessible to anyone but scholars.

If we were able to ask Turner if he would prefer to have, say, 25,000 of the watercolours and drawings spread around the world’s great museums, with large archive centres in Paris, New York, Washington, Berlin, Rome, and the major museums in China, India, Brazil, Australia, South Africa, Russia – don’t you think he would prefer it?

Perhaps even 50 or so of his great paintings shared out for each museum to display in their own collection?

I don’t know any artist who wouldn’t prefer to have his work visible, and available around the globe; a dozen archives in the world’s leading museums for students, critics, writers, anyone, able to study his work, rather than in one largely invisible one.

I’d go further.

How would Turner feel if we parted with some of those 30,000 works to be apportioned among the world’s great institutions, enabling us to build a war chest to strengthen the nation’s core collection of art of the past 100 years?

Turner was well-known for supporting younger artists, hence his choice as the bearer of the Turner prize gong. He left a financial legacy which he hoped would be used to support less fortunate artists, planning and designing an almshouse for them in Twickenham. And before the great and the good of the art world throw up their hands in horror at the mere suggestion of dispersing his legacy, the Charity Commission decreed in 1995 that the Turner bequest was free of Turner’s conditions, and there was no obligation to keep them together.

That being the case, why not examine the advantage of sharing some of his great achievement – therefore helping fulfil Turner’s true intention of having his works always available to be seen (admittedly not in the Turner Museum he was promised at the time – a promise the government reneged on 22 years after his death), but nonetheless widely visible, rather than hidden from view; the Turners you own, but can’t see.

I think he would also share my view that the job of a museum of modern art is to ensure that in decades, even centuries to come, the key works that represent important developments in art are available to be examined by future visitors.

This is hard to pull off with a measly acquisitions budget, and it would have always been wrong for the state to buy very new art cheaply before the artist has proven his worth.

That means you have to build the national collection around art that is by definition validated – and more expensive.

But our own little Occam’s Razor leaves us with an inadequate national collection of our great artists – not enough prime Hockney, Freud, Bacon, Auerbach, not a good collection of British Kitchen Sink painters, or British Pop Art pioneers, like Hamilton, and a weak group of works by the YBA generation.

It is a duty of care for museum managers to ensure that in their term of office they are adequately providing future generations of Britons with the ability to see our own outstanding artists well-represented.

With the kind of money raised by spreading our Turners around, we are still left not only with the premier collection of Turner that his bequest provided – it could allow Britain to have a collection of 20th-century art to rival that of MoMA, in New York.

Turners could also be traded with other museums for their own masterpieces by artists they themselves hold in some depth; they could manage to give up one or two in order to achieve the holy grail of a powerful Turner collection of their own that they would be able to display.

Even a staunch admirer of Turner, the redoubtable art critic Brian Sewell wrote at the time the Tate was mounting its campaign to save The Blue Rigi painting from being sold abroad: “This is just bloody silly. We have 20,000 Turners in this country and we do not need to spend £5m to keep The Blue Rigi or indeed any of the Rigis.”

I think that JMW would be keen to see his bequest gathering a worldwide audience instead of gathering dust; kept together not in a storage facility, but across our world’s greatest museums.

As an artist who travelled widely himself to paint, he would probably hope that in this day of global fluidity, his work could be accessible to as many people as possible, everywhere.

He would also have been proud that he alone had made it possible for his homeland to have the spectacularly good national collection of the world’s modern masterpieces it deserves.

Hollywood’s treatment of Citizen Kane’s maker is no surprise from an industry that gives Oscars to so many dud films.

How do you handle failure? I handle failure very badly. Bitterly. Indignantly. Girly tears. I once saw a three-hour BBC interview with Orson Welles, and if it is possible to fall for a man just from seeing him on the telly, Mr Welles has had me as his love slave since.

Welles had manifold reasons to be bitter about life’s setbacks, not the least being that his unquestioned prowess as a film-maker didn’t stop Hollywood treating him like a disease. After years of having to panhandle for backing to fund his film projects – all unwanted by the studios, all later to be recognised as exquisite jewels – he eventually had to rely on appearing in TV commercials, endorsing wines or Spanish sherry, to finance his final movies.

Throughout the interview Welles was witty, fascinating, self-deprecating, animated, radiant, sparkling. Without a sullen or bitter bone in his immense body, he was a twinkly-eyed, beguilingly charming giant, not even fractionally undone by the burden of many setbacks and humiliations. The movie business is more than capable of driving anyone quite insane – the more insane, the more strangely gifted you may be. The story of Orson Welles illustrates vividly that it requires a resolutely secure person to take failure gracefully. Not a hope for most of us, and certainly not me.

A quick glance at the history of Oscar winners and nominations throws up many outstanding films that were passed over as Oscar finalists, with more mundane products regularly picking up the plaudits. Since 1950, none of the following movies have even been nominated for best film: North by Northwest; Some Like It Hot; Vertigo; The Searchers; When Harry Met Sally; Blade Runner; Cool Hand Luke; 2001: A Space Odyssey; Groundhog Day; Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Of course, you may not agree that some of these films are particularly distinguished. Nonetheless, a list of the films nominated for Oscars over the past 60 years would make the most stoic of people weep. Mr Welles was beaten to an Oscar for Citizen Kane in 1942 by How Green Was My Valley. But it would be cruel punishment indeed to the Oscar ceremony, which gives us such queasy delight each year, to dwell on the number of times a certifiable dud like The Greatest Show on Earth beat a masterpiece like High Noon to best picture.

Sadly, in the movies as in life, being the best you can be isn’t necessarily a winning formula. Years ago, we bought a large US research company, whose specialist area was working for seven of the eight big Hollywood studios, pre-testing their films. The gentleman running this business was considered an all-powerful guru among the movie community, and his company would screen your movie at a preview stage, and have the audience score it before leaving the theatre. They would tick: a) enjoyed thoroughly; b) quite entertained; c) rather bored, etc; and also a) would see again; b) would recommend; c) would advise against, etc.

They would get ratings for each actor, and often try out different endings, to see which performances could be cut, and which finale worked more favourably. The studios could then determine which movies would be worth supporting heavily with a big marketing budget, and which to quietly give up on.

I thought that it would be illuminating to meet our guru running this company, and find out a little about how all the testing works. The thrust of my question to him was: if all of the studios produce 20 movies a year, but only three of them make substantial profits, five of them do OK, and the others are financial flops, what useful guidelines did his research provide? Three out of 20 hits didn’t appear to be a glittering track record for the benefits of pre-testing.

He explained one thing very clearly. “Each multiplex has screens allocated to each studio. The screens need filling. Studios have to create product to fill their screen, and the amount of good product is limited. So you have to go on creating films even if there is only mild enthusiasm for the project, in order to protect your multiplex screen allocation moving over to a competitor studio.”

It would be indiscreet for me to pass on other revelations he gave me about the dismal strike rate that Hollywood achieves. But at least I now knew the answer to a question that had often puzzled me – how did that film ever get made?

Even a show-off like me finds this new, super-rich art-buying crowd vulgar and depressingly shallow.

Being an art buyer these days is comprehensively and indisputably vulgar. It is the sport of the Eurotrashy, Hedge-fundy, Hamptonites; of trendy oligarchs and oiligarchs; and of art dealers with masturbatory levels of self-regard. They were found nestling together in their super yachts in Venice for this year’s spectacular art biennale. Venice is now firmly on the calendar of this new art world, alongside St Barts at Christmas and St Tropez in August, in a giddy round of glamour-filled socialising, from one swanky party to another.

Artistic credentials are au courant in the important business of being seen as cultured, elegant and, of course, stupendously rich.

Do any of these people actually enjoy looking at art? Or do they simply enjoy having easily recognised, big-brand name pictures, bought ostentatiously in auction rooms at eye-catching prices, to decorate their several homes, floating and otherwise, in an instant demonstration of drop-dead coolth and wealth. Their pleasure is to be found in having their lovely friends measuring the weight of their baubles, and being awestruck.

It is no surprise, then, that the success of the uber art dealers is based upon the mystical power that art now holds over the super-rich. The new collectors, some of whom have become billionaires many times over through their business nous, are reduced to jibbering gratitude by their art dealer or art adviser, who can help them appear refined, tasteful and hip, surrounded by their achingly cool masterpieces.

Not so long ago, I believed that anything that helped broaden interest in current art was to be welcomed; that only an elitist snob would want art to be confined to a worthy group of aficionados. But even a self-serving narcissistic showoff like me finds this new art world too toe-curling for comfort. In the fervour of peacock excess, it’s not even considered necessary to waste one’s time looking at the works on display. At the world’s mega-art blowouts, it’s only the pictures that end up as wallflowers.

I don’t know very many people in the art world, only socialise with the few I like, and have little time to gnaw my nails with anxiety about any criticism I hear about.

If I stop being on good behaviour for a moment, my dark little secret is that I don’t actually believe many people in the art world have much feeling for art and simply cannot tell a good artist from a weak one, until the artist has enjoyed the validation of others – a received pronunciation. For professional curators, selecting specific paintings for an exhibition is a daunting prospect, far too revealing a demonstration of their lack of what we in the trade call “an eye”. They prefer to exhibit videos, and those incomprehensible post-conceptual installations and photo-text panels, for the approval of their equally insecure and myopic peers. This “conceptualised” work has been regurgitated remorselessly since the 1960s, over and over and over again.

Few people in contemporary art demonstrate much curiosity. The majority spend their days blathering on, rather than trying to work out why one artist is more interesting than another, or why one picture works and another doesn’t.

Art critics mainly see the shows they are assigned to cover by their editors, and have limited interest in looking at much else. Art dealers very rarely see the exhibitions at other dealers’ galleries. I’ve heard that almost all the people crowding around the big art openings barely look at the work on display and are just there to hobnob. Nothing wrong with that, except that none of them ever come back to look at the art – but they will tell everyone, and actually believe, that they have seen the exhibition.

Please don’t read my pompous views above as referring to the great majority of gallery shows, where dealers display art they hope someone will want to buy for their home, and new collectors are born every week. This aspect of the art world fills me with pleasure, whether I love all the art or not.

I am regularly asked if I would buy art if there was no money in it for me. There is no money in it for me. Any profit I make selling art goes back into buying more art. Nice for me, because I can go on finding lots of new work to show off. Nice for those in the art world who view this approach as testimony to my venality, shallowness, malevolence.

Everybody wins.

And it’s understandable that every time you make an artist happy by selecting their work, you create 100 people that you’ve offended – the artists you didn’t select.

I take comfort that our shows have received disobliging reviews since our opening exhibition of Warhol, Judd, Twombly and Marden in 1985. I still hold that it would be a black day when everybody likes a show we produce. It would be a pedestrian affair, art establishment compliant, and I would finally know the game was up.