Tricky Ricky

He might not have pink hair or body piercings, but Richard Demarco's conventional appearance is just a front. An artist himself, he's best known as one of Scotland’s most influential promoters of contemporary art. A shameless egotist, he's evangelical about avant-garde art, which is not to everybody's taste, and since the 1960s he has struggled to raise funds from professional arts bodies who were often more interested in cost-benefit analysis and the number of bums on seats.

Despite his Napoleonic tendencies, he is a real charmer. After giving me a guided tour of his current exhibition, he politely asked me what I did for a living. When I told him, he took my hand and gazed up at me (he's famously very short), and said that what I did was far more important than the work of any artist. It felt like I'd just received a benediction.

On reflection, maybe I shouldn't have said I was a heart surgeon, but I was too embarassed to admit to being one of those detested bean counters.