In 1987 a Civil Service inquiry decided that the pay of the Director of the Tate Gallery should match that of the Director of the much larger Victoria & Albert Museum and of the National Gallery, where the pictures were regarded as being much more important, because, and here I quote, "the Director of the Tate has to deal with the very difficult problem of modern art".

Damien Hirst's Mother and Child Divided (1993) is a work which can at first glance be read as nothing more than two brutally severed carcasses. "A freak show" was how the art critic of the Sunday Telegraph responded to its presentation in the Turner Prize in 1995. For me, the undoubted shock, even disgust provoked by the work is part of its appeal. Art should be transgressive. Life is not all sweet.

For the late twentieth-century museum director there is no more certain prospect for audience acclaim and sponsor success than those Impressionist and Post-impressionist artists who were so reviled a century earlier

After thirty years of looking at new work in galleries and even newer work in studios, I am very familiar with the experience of being completely at a loss when confronting a new idea or image.

For many years, and like many British people, I had little feeling for the most expressive and roughest form of early twentieth century European painting, the expressionism of German artists around the First World War like Kirchner.

The argument that new vision becomes the reference point for the future, is a line that I have been driven to use on many occasions.

Craft, I would argue, is not an essential part of art, though skill is. That skill may indeed find its expression in draughtsmanship or carving, realised through the hand of the artist, but it may also be directed towards the selection of material or the choice of an expert fabricator.