Last night we attended a lecture given by Amartya Sen as a preliminary to him being awarded the first Maynard Keynes prize for all round brilliance.   It was an astonishingly clear exposition of the continuing relevance of Maynard Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace in an environment in which so many professional so-called financial economists (ie bankers) advocate the imposition of extreme measures of austerity on European countries, including, most especially, Greece.   He compared it to the administration of rat poison.   Afterwards I walked down the track to Tilton where Keynes lived.

I spent some of the morning at the Global Private Museum Summit which is being held alongside Art 15 at Kensington Olympia.   The Summit reflects the astonishing rise of private art museums in nearly every country across the world including France, Germany, Italy and Romania and with representatives from Miami, Indonesia and Shanghai.   The idea was that I should talk about the RA as the world’s oldest private museum which in some ways it is in not having government funding, but the problems and issues felt different to those of recently established contemporary museums which are generally relatively small-scale and run by their owners.

I went to an event this morning to celebrate the fact that the Bank of England has decided, after a mere 321 years, to put the face of a British visual artist on its £20 note.   It has established a grandly named Banknote Character Advisory Committee to decide, but is asking the public to send in recommendations.   My vote would go to Sir Joshua Reynolds, of course, but I detected a certain disapproval on the part of Andrew Graham-Dixon that he painted portraits.   Blake should be a candidate as a poet artist working in a number of different genres.   Graham-Dixon spoke in favour of Constable and Turner.  Gwen John, perhaps ?  It can’t be David Hockney because he’s still alive.