Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1994, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is an art critic. He's been the subject of much criticism himself.

Earlier this year, 35 prominent members of the art world denounced him for homophobia,

misogyny and hypocrisy. Now 62, he didn't go to school until he was 11. He worked at

Windsor Castle, he worked at Christie's, and then came into the public eye in

1979 when he publicly defended his friend and mentor

Sir Anthony Blunt, the keeper of the Queen's pictures who had been unmasked

as a spy.

Since then, writing for the evening standard,

he has frequently and vituperatively attacked what he regards as

the excesses of contemporary art. We live, he says, in a society that for too long has been

indulgent to the new. He is Brian Sewall. There may be those

Brian who are over indulgent to the new. You on the other hand often denounce

it without even seeing it. Is that fair? No that is that's that's neither true nor

fair. It's an accusation made in the Sunday Times and repeated by somebody who

frequently broadcasts the BBC. But you never go to a private view, do you?

No, that's a rather different matter.

If you go to a private view, you certainly don't see the pictures.

If you want to see pictures, you must go and there is nobody else there.

But if you want to be topical and write about it, you've got to get on with it and see them quite quickly and write about them.

Most people are very kind and understand that I am an intensely shy person, you may find that difficult to believe, and they let me in early.

...