meaningful and profound. Do you remember the first piece you collected? The piece that trig- gered everything? I'm a natural accumulator, but I really stepped into this arena from American folk art. I'd stumbled across it because it was affordable, there was a lot of it and it was unpretentious. I come from a film background — an applied art form. Like a lot of film people, I'd often found the art world tricky in terms of the language that artists and gal- leries used to make simple things seem very complicated. To me, the opposite was more interesting. And perhaps it is this that which led me to that work and then to a number of different genres, all of which had very immediate emotional forms, from the graphic folk world to the more psychological works of self-taught artists like HenryDarger. It was quite simply fundamentally appealing to me. Do you find that contemporary art tends to be formulaic? There are good and bad examples of everything. The good unin- tentional and self-taught work tends to be very alive, personal, and unique. It tells an individual story and often has an unusual format. The medium might be strange, but that will mean it has all kinds of unexpected things going on, which never get repeated because the language is unique to the individual who made it. With contemporary art, it can be the opposite: lots of young people going to the same art schools and lectures, trying to find what they want to say, or, more cynically, looking for a market in terms of what they are going to do. Sure there are some brilliant creative souls who come out of the colleges, but it's a much more considered activity. If they buck that system and are talented, then they may become the finest artists of that generation. But many others tend to repeat within a certain vernacular, or at least that how it often seems to me. There are of course vernaculars within the area that I look at. There are people who are obsessed with text, there's a lot of graphic pri- mary work, there's many naive drawings and so on. What we look for is something that transcends these elements, that is meaningful, intellectually, aesthetically, and also emotionally. We are looking for something that resonates. How has the project that the project has evolved over the years? The evolution is simply the one of opportunity — I never believed it should last more than two weeks — so there isn't a master plan, it's a more organic process. Having done two shows in Primrose Hill, a big one in Italy and a small one in Tate Modern, it felt correct to do some- thing different. We never believed that the museum should be in one place — and when we were looking at these workshops, Selfridges turned up, offering us the cornerwindow for an installation. We started talking and I said, "The corner would be good, but it would be wonderful to have a little more room. We have a lot of work." They then said, "Would you like all the windows then?"You can reach hundreds of thousands, even millions of people with those windows. It was a tremendous opportunity to communicate, but a very compli- cated one. So we tried to work out how we would do it. It occurredto me that it would be wrong to put physical art in these windows, so we took a separate space — the Ultralounge — for the show itself, and thewindows became installations, our interpretations of the work of ten ofthe artists in the show, running down Oxford Street. We created worlds,conceived like miniature film sets, all based on the artists' own imagery, simply expanded and three-dimensionalized so that anyone looking from can understand who these artists are and what they do. To me, that's a revolutionary idea. Over a million people will see and engage with artists who are invisible to most of society. It's an exhibition all its own — even if people don't come into the building to see the show itself, it will have connected. If you look at the history of Selfridges, Gordon Selfridge always in- tended to compete with the museums in terms of engaging the public like this. He would do exhibition-type displays there, for example, showing the first plane that crossed the Channel. He was a showman, a ringmaster, and an entrepreneur. That's a little bit how we look at the Museum of Everything: it's an old-school museum, as much about entertainment as engagement. That is not quite what today's version of amuseum does, because these tend to be a little higher-brow and a touch more formal — and I am not really a highbrow or more-formal person. Considering how popular the Museum of Everything, could you see it becoming permanent? As well as being informal, I'm also noncommittal in that I like things to evolve naturally. I would thrilled for the Museum of Everything to goonto exhibition #4,000, but I would only do it if A: people turn up — if no one comes, then I don't see why we should continue — and B: we stayloose and free. During the lifetime of the Museum of Everything, one of the greatest museums of the genre — and one of our main inspirations — closed down its main site: the American Folk Art Museum in New York. The maintenanceof a large public space is a serious concern and when I last spoke to the chairman, the lovely Barry Briskin, he told it to me straight: "James," he said, "never buy a building!" So, permanent? One day perhaps. Today, we're on the street. Sep 2011