The J. Paul Getty Museum

The J. Paul Getty Museum is one of the great art museums of the world. And that's quite miraculous when you consider that it has all come about essentially in the last 50 years. The focus of the Getty's collecting has always been on few works but at the very highest quality. It's aimed to be a collection of masterpieces, and that I think was what makes it stand out so much from other bigger and deeper collections. The quality of what you see at the Getty is absolutely first-grade.

Education is absolutely of the center of all that we do as a museum, in the process we go through and collecting, in displaying it and explaining it to our audiences, but also the research that then flows from that by art curators and by visiting scholars, and all of the educational programs that we provide around them. So we are in that sense not just a museum, but we are a laboratory for art, and indeed, a university of the visual arts.

Over the last 40 years, also, I think the Getty Museum has done an extraordinary job of building a collection of European art, from ancient times to the beginnings of the 20th century. In the next 40 years, I think we're—will be more important to put this tradition, or these traditions, in a more global and intercultural context. Because there's always connections and influences and interactions between cultures, none of them evolves or emerges entirely in a vacuum, and it'll be important, I think, in the increasingly global world we live in to understand, also, the development of our history in truly global terms.