The man who made us love art

When Nicholas Serota was appointed as Tate's director in 1988, he was offered danger money by the Civil Service. Their review of museum directors' pay concluded that the Tate director's salary should be brought into line with other major museums because 'the Director of the Tate has to deal with the very difficult problem of modern art'.

Now it is traditional museums and galleries which struggle to meet their audience targets, while Tate Modern has become the most popular art museum in the world. In the televised Dimbleby lecture he gave six months after Tate Modern's triumphant opening, Serota wondered whether it was time for him to relinquish his 'danger money' and take a pay cut.

Of course he was joking, but Serota's efforts have transformed us into a nation that cares about contemporary art, and it is one of his proudest achievements. 'There are many, many satisfactions in my work,' he says, 'but an important one for me is going into Tate Modern on any day, and seeing people taking command of the building, and basically saying, "This is ours, not Nick Serota's or any one else's, but ours." It happened even in the first week of Tate Modern being opened, and it's a wonderful success to see people responding and regarding this as something that is important in their lives.'

The ease with which Serota has overseen this cultural shift is deceptive. He was knighted in 1999, 'I didn't exactly dither about accepting it, but I did think about it. The Tate is at the heart of British society and part of the British establishment, the knighthood is a recognition that you've done the job reasonably well, and a recognition on the part of certain people that the job is important. It's a tightrope - I have to bring a Reynolds into the collection as well as a Damien Hirst - and I have to play both games. The biggest skill in my work is listening to other people, evaluating what they say, and then following my instincts.'

Serota is softly spoken and a formidable listener: he blasts you with the beam of his concentration, and his every word, and even movement, is carefully considered. Often described as 'the most powerful man in contemporary art', he has to be circumspect about the most casual of art world encounters - 'absolute power is absolutely corrupting is all that I would say' - and he can cut a solitary figure. But I suspect that's the way he likes it: he says he lives for art; the glamour and acclaim he has acquired along the way seem, like his knighthood, an almost incidental means to an end.

Serota was born in Hampstead in 1946. His father was a civil engineer, his mother a prominent London councillor who became a Labour life peer. Serota won a LCC scholarship to Haberdashers' Askes, where he was made head boy. He says: 'As a child, I do remember at one point that I thought I might want to become an architect - in some ways I wish I still had, although I certainly couldn't have built Tate Modern.' Instead, Serota went to Cambridge to read Economics, but after one year changed his degree to History of Art. 'When I was at Cambridge, I found myself thinking more and more about pictures. There was a lot of activity in London. The ICA was moving out of Dover Street into the Mall, there were very, very good shows at the Whitechapel - it was all very inspiring and I moved more and more towards contemporary and English art.'

Serota returned to London, took an MA at the Courtauld Institute, where he was taught by Anita Brookner, and wrote his thesis on Turner in Switzerland. As an exhibition organiser at the Arts Council, Serota learnt the business of arts administration. Then, at 27, he was appointed director of the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford. Three years later, in 1976, he became director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery. Serota turned the ailing gallery's fortunes around, with a £1.7 million extension to the building and an exhibition programme of modern and contemporary art that gave it renewed pre-eminence, and made him an obvious choice as Tate's director in 1988.

His aim was to involve living contemporary artists with the Tate, and to make its work important to them. 'I think it is partly to do with the fact that I come from a generation in which artists began to work making installations and sculpture began to invade the space. It became essential to have the artist involved in making an exhibition: you couldn't just take the framed picture and hang it on the wall, or take a sculpture and put it on the plinth, you had to work with the artist to control the space and so that's been fairly fundamental to what I've done.'

Almost immediately after he was appointed, Serota came in for criticism over the Tate's acquisition for £700,000 of a Joseph Beuys installation of rocks with felt-lined sockets. 'Some time in the Sixties or early Seventies, the Tate became more important than the Royal Academy in terms of setting an agenda and being effectively the new establishment taste. At that point, I think, the Tate moved into the firing line. But people want to see things for themselves, which I think is one of the reasons why the Turner Prize has been such a success - it's the chance to see what is regarded by specialists as being interesting and exciting at this particular moment. If you look at the list of winners, it's pretty strong and a broad range of art - ranging from Malcolm Morley to Douglas Gordon, with Rachel Whiteread and Richard Deacon in between.'

When the Turner Prize started in 1984, it struggled to find an audience; now the annual ceremony is the art world's equivalent of the Oscars, broadcast live on Channel 4 with Madonna presenting this year's prize. Does the current fashion for art cause Serota concern? 'No, I think one can be far too precious about that, I really do. I think it's terribly easy to get too serious about it - although I'm very serious about it on one level - but I don't think one should feel that art is undermined in its seriousness by the fact that it's associated with celebrities, or that people are only interested in the fashionability of our period's interest in it. I think the art is strong enough to deal with that, to resist that, it will go on.