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Most museums - with all their burdens to pay for exhibitions, administration, and security - really don't have any money really to acquire art, with few exceptions.

When museums are built these days, architects, directors, and trustees seem most concerned about social space: places to have parties, eat dinner, wine-and-dine donors. Sure, these are important these days - museums have to bring in money - but they gobble up space and push the art itself far away from the entrance.

In a global race, can we really justify the huge number of expensive peripheral European institutions? Can we justify a commission that gets ever larger? Can we carry on with an organisation that has a multibillion pound budget but not enough focus on controlling spending and shutting down programmes that haven't worked?

Museums are managers of consciousness. They give us an interpretation of history, of how to view the world and locate ourselves in it. They are, if you want to put it in positive terms, great educational institutions. If you want to put it in negative terms, they are propaganda machines.

On the one hand, the financial projection is on the agenda - we will see if this problem can be resolved or not. I think it is a right idea to stage a special summit, which would deal with the question of priorities of European politics.

I believe in the democratization of the arts. What do I mean by that? I think museums, with some exceptions, have a responsibility to educate a much broader public.

Individually, museums are fine institutions, dedicated to the high values of preservation, education and truth; collectively, their growth in numbers points to the imaginative death of this country.

The budget doesn't have much control over the government. Then again, the government doesn't have much control over the budget.

A museum is like a valuing machine. Museums and the industrial society started at the same moment, and they're really tied into each other. They've been all about displaying objects and the kind of wealth that can be derived from objects and promoting that point.

Of course art world ethics are important. But museums are no purer than any other institution or business. Academics aren't necessarily more high-minded than gallerists.