In putting an exhibition together, your very first thing is your list of desirable loans. So you have that list. This is perfection. And then you find that something which is really rather crucial to perhaps the internal argument of the exhibition, can’t be borrowed. It may be promised to some other exhibition, it may be in too fragile a condition to travel. And so you can’t have it, so you have to find something else. And that means you’re really back... sort of, going through all the possibilities of… we want a picture which demonstrates precisely the same thing.  Where are we going to find it? This museum, that museum? You have to know something about the alternatives. You then have to find out whether the alternatives themselves are going to be possible. And you might… and it does happen. You might get not only the first refusal, but a second and a third and a fourth refusal. So you end up with a picture, if you’re determined to follow this argument through, you may end up with a picture that you’ve never seen.

And I will give you an example, not one in which I was involved, but there was an exhibition at the Royal Academy some donkey’s years ago, to which a picture from São Paulo in Brazil was sent. And I said, for God’s sake, why did you ask for that heap of rubbish? It must have cost a fortune to get it here, and it’s in appalling condition. And of course it transpired that precisely the process I’ve just described had been gone through and the last thing that they thought would demonstrate the point was the picture that they knew only from reproductions or photographs. And, of course, it was a disaster when it arrived. But they had to put it in, because it was the logical sort of chink in the argument, that this picture could fill.

So that’s one thing. Another… you learn from working on an international exhibition that there are problems in translation.