 When you go around an art exhibition you go to the thing that captivates you and you talk to it You say, well, why do I like this picture and probably it may be because you don't even know But it's probably the compositions got a lot to do with it. It may be to do the color things It may be that's the way the paint is laid on it could be lots of things So actually you're asking questions and it's answering them I believe a lot of people talk to art, but they don't know they're talking to art Personally what I want from an artist is what they paint for themselves and not what they paint for the general public Because what they paint for the general public is part of what's fashionable then and makes the artist money That doesn't interest me. As I say to an artist, what I want is not your head, not your intelligence, I want your guts This is a sketch by Lord Layton, one of the most famous Victorian artists When Layton wanted to escape his public and the pressures of people wanting to buy pictures from you, he painted landscapes And I love to touch my artists and I love to feel the artists and these landscapes are very personal things This is a mask that was owned by Man Ray, part of his life and in his collection till he died and in his wife's collection till she died In this case, you're not only part touching part of the artist, you are touching the era Abstract art came out of these masks. It's a bit of history, but it's also a bit of Man Ray I think it's very important if you love a picture, you want to talk about it and describe it And sometimes you learn things about pictures which nobody else has ever thought about When I started the Victorian art department at Sonnabesville, Georgia in 1971, one of the first things I did was collect a library When I started on my own, I had to start from scratch and I collected a huge library as well When we closed the gallery, I decided to give it away and because Paul Mellon is the only art library in Britain who is an open library and has a great library, I gave it to them. People don't really know this, but Mellon is the one place where anybody can go but they will give you any book from their library and you can study there, so it's an incredible study place If I had no art in the house, it doesn't matter to me, but if I do have art, I love my art and I talk to it all the time If you live with something long enough, you're always talking to it and sometimes it answers your question