How do you feel about art galleries? Is your feeling about humour in art some sort of reaction against art galleries?

I think art galleries are useful places to hold exhibitions. I haven't had a gallery yet. If I'd been offered a gallery I'd have worked in a gallery but Cambridge town centre is my gallery.

Or your head, in fact. Your head is a sort of portable gallery.

That's one of the works, yes.

If you could get into a gallery would that mean that you would then stop the 'public exhibitions'?

I wouldn't stop it, I'd do it as well. But it's been very effective. I'd say this interview is the result of my 'public art'

That's right. That's how I'm aware of you.

If I'd just sat at home painting all day, no-one would ever hear of me. Perhaps when I was dead they might say "Well that's quite interesting work. Let's put him in the local gallery."

There are many artists sitting in a backstreet painting away, nobody's heard of them, thinking "What I need to do is make some kind of exhibition of myself", but they don't actually do it...

I think post-modernist artists - the famous ones, the ones that are remembered - post modernist art is about being famous, really, rather than the quality of art. Basically the art is about selling yourself. If Damien Hirst sneezed on a Saturday and called it art, everybody would go 'Oh, wonderful darling'. He could really push the frontiers of art, he can do that now. He's got the clout.

People who go to the galleries go to see art, but you make people see it whether they want to or not.

I'm bringing it to the people, yes.

You're not giving people the choice whether its art or not or whether they look at it or not.

No. A lot of people just walk straight past me and don't look at me but afterwards they turn and around go, 'Shit, look at that man over there'.

That's the whole point about public sculptures though, isn't it? They're right there in peoples' faces and they're going around them but they have to look at them. It's the same sort of thing.

What I hope to do when I make my first, if I make my first million is drop a million pound in Scottish one pound notes out of an airplane on Cambridge on market day. Also sell my seed to the nation as my little joke you know - it's basically how any woman who wants my baby can have it... bit of megalomania there, that's the sort of mad thoughts that I have and also, oh I had this idea where I'd collect loads of canvases in a field and get a big airplane and spray paint them all and then put an advert in the paper saying if you want a free work of art by Barmy Art just send...    yes send them one each. That's bringing art to the public.

I had this idea of promoting artists in the local area by putting an advert in the local paper saying there's a fund of, say, a hundred thousand pounds and every artist sends a work of art into that central fund and receives an equal share of that hundred thousand pounds. Then you advertise in a different part of the country, if you want a free work of art from a Cambridge artist, and then you're transferring a work of art from one part of the country to another. You do that a couple of times and then you create a market for Cambridge art around the country. If you did this for the whole of the country you could promote British art, couldn't you? It could create a market for British art. I mean you'd get people sending a toilet roll - like myself - I sent a half eaten sandwich to the Hayward gallery the other day, I called it 'Why I left Harvard'. So there you go. Four years ago I sent a stick to the Tate Gallery called 'Silly Buggers'. That was quite good.

It's doubtless downstairs in their collection somewhere.

Oh they chucked it away; they told me they chucked it away. Awful isn't it? I could sue them for that. They said "Well you can't be serious". At the time I wasn't into Barmy Art and I was a bit in awe of them so I said "Okay then, ignore me - sorry. It was a manic moment." - 'Come and collect it or we're going to chuck it away', they said.

I've sent them a few things. A couple of times they've banned me from phoning them - the Tate Gallery. I was always phoning them up with ideas. They used to say 'Well, you come up with a new movement every week'. I was a bit bonkers at the time I was phoning them up. I used to have these manic ideas, I thought they were very very clever.

I wrote to them afterwards and apologised. I said I was a manic depressive and I get these ideas sometimes, and that's when they banned me because I told them I was a manic depressive. Interesting enough, isn't it? Even though there's a link between manic depression and art. Because I told them I was a manic depressive they said "Oh well we can't have him writing to us."

That questions the link between art and the 'Art Establishment'

Exactly, yes. I think that someone said that the art establishment destroys creativity.

They certainly seem to prefer artifacts to artists, don't they?

Yes, yes.

When you became Mr. Barmy Art was that a way of putting all that stuff in a box and dealing with it?

I think that I was a bit manic when I decided to be Mr. Barmy Art. It seemed right at the time. I don't regret it at all now. I think it was a way of coping and departmentalising my emotions about madness and art and my theories.

One of my main concerns is that if I come up with a serious work now, people won't take me seriously because they'll think "barmy art, - it's just humour and madness in art."

Is that when Keith Lawton would be re-introduced?

Probably. I've been Keith Lawton a few times. For example I've phoned up a cigarette company the other day about some idea of having on the back of cigarette packet, the type and number of chemicals added, and also producing a straight cigarette, without the chemicals in, like rolling tobacco in a pre-rolled cigarette.

I have these conceptualist ideas in business as well as in art. I share them. I call myself Keith Lawton then.