The challenging absence in a spirited world of what we might call the serious and unjaded...

Before I met the artist, a small part of me was on a kind of spontaneous voyage of discovery about artists anyway. When for example I made my film about an artist - a con artist, he famously liked to call himself - I was living across the ocean. I had meant it as an article, this exploration into the soul of a so-called modern artist, but ten minutes in I just knew it had to be a film. I have mentioned this film before. It was strange because there I was, excited about what I knew was essentially an ugly story about a man who believed modern art was a con and that he was the world's greatest con artist. (He enlisted other people to do his work for him.) In retrospect, what I think I was also doing at the time was mourning the absence of the kind of serious and unjaded work I liked. The kind the artist does here today. Of course I never thought the cynicism in the art world back then would burrow itself so deep in contemporary art's psyche that once I did come across such work, it would have such trouble finding a place to show itself. So what went wrong? Did it all start with postmodernism and the faintly unexamined belief that nothing was as it seems anymore and that nothing therefore could be taken simply for what it was? (Even the long-windedness of that last sentence reminds me of how much I disliked what postmodernism so swiftly became.) Anyway, in my film I had about six principal interviewees who appeared throughout, one or two of them well known writers. The main thread of the film was done in the style of cinéma-vérité, which is to say unbiased documentary realism, and these interviews were an opportunity to take stock of the madness unfolding in both the artist's life and the art world itself. What I realise now is that they were like six horsemen of some kind of art world apocalypse. When I see a human skull now riddled with diamonds I understand everything. We don't give a fig about human dignity. We don't care whose skull it was. We just care about the money. Well, maybe that's not entirely true. I care, and the artist cares, about the man whose skull it was. We care as deeply about the person as you can about someone you did not know but whose dignity you wish to preserve. Diamonds are not a skull's best friend.