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. - Nicholas Serota

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.

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.