[Q] And do you, as a critic, have a sort of responsibility to the emotional welfare, one might say, of the person you’re writing about? I mean, I’m thinking of Kitaj in fact...

I have no responsibility for somebody who is immensely wealthy, immensely popular, is subsidised by the state, who is sent off to Venice to represent us in the Biennale, who’s sent to São Paulo, to that Biennial, who’s in the great German show that occurs… documenta. No, I… no, no. He is there. He is my target, because part of what I’m saying is: how did you get where you are? Because you’ve been the beneficiary of unalloyed adulation by idiots who give you money. You don’t deserve to be where you are. So pricking balloons and emperor’s new clothes and all the other clichés, that’s what I’m there to do. I am a critic. It’s not for me to go along with every critic who thinks this man is marvellous, because there are so many critics, like Richard Cork, who preceded me, who are vicars of Bray where these things are concerned, and who will never express an opinion unless somebody else has expressed it first. And if the tide of opinion is that somebody is marvellous, is worthy of the Turner Prize at 25,000 quid a year, you know, and is so great a painter that he must be made a trustee of the Tate Gallery, no. No. This has somehow to be checked. Even if I don’t succeed in stopping it, at least there may be, as a consequence, a reconsideration of this artist. Some of them are so entrenched and so powerful that they are invincible, and I’m constantly saying I have no influence, because I have no influence. I’ve never been the trustee of anything. I’ve never been asked by a Minister of the Arts for my opinion on any of the idiotic things the DCMS, the Department of the Arts does, or whatever.

So I have no power, but I feel that having no power, I must use the only instrument I’ve got, which is my page in the Evening Standard.