Inviting criticism ... Anthony Gormley stands amongst the sculptures of his 2003 Domain Field exhibition. Photograph: Owen Humphreys/PA
Like Judith and Michael, I am prepared to suffer the complications of my relationships with artists. It comes with the territory. Without such intimacies, I wouldn't bother to be a critic at all. No conflict, no interest, I always say.
Like most people, I only have a few real friends. Luckily for me, some of them are artists. Most of my enemies are artists too, with the odd critic and museum type thrown in for good measure. There are people I know well who have stopped speaking to me for years at a time, after something I have said or written, but I have never held it against them, or against my judgement of what they have gone on to do later, as Tracey Emin can confirm, after an estrangement between us that lasted several years. Strange though it may appear, some artists even invite truthful criticism. Antony Gormley once asked me round to his studio "to give me a hard time", as he put it, not long after I had dissed a group of his sculptures in a review. As soon as I got home from grilling him he called me back - "You weren't hard enough. Come back tomorrow", he said. Candour is good.
I hope I have never held an artist's animosity or their friendship against them. I agree with Michael Billington when he says: "But, when it comes to the hazardous business of putting words on paper, something strange happens. Old friendships and enmities are temporarily banished and you would, if the need arose, give your own grandmother a stinking review if she committed the cardinal sin: that of perpetrating bad art." One tries to be urbane about this sort of thing. I do not live in a cave. I do not bring my own thermos and sandwiches. I prefer the company of artists to that of most critics. Artists can more cruel about each other than any critic I have ever met, and just as hungry and insightful when it comes to looking at art. They know more about how art gets made, are sharper when comes to detecting when someone is faking it, and more generous about genuine failure. Artists may be monomaniacal, but so are most critics. I have learned more from artists, from the way they think as much as the things they make and do, than from any critic. The love-me-love-my-art types who appear to be the bane of Jonathan Jones' life are best avoided.
Jones writes "So - be friends with an artist? Are you kidding? They only want to talk about themselves anyway, until they're about 60, when they start reading a few books and visiting the National Gallery and you can have a decent conversation about art." It sounds as if Jonathan doesn't like artists, much less respects them, and regards them only as an unavoidable nuisance, getting in the way of his pure communion with the art. It is so much easier to deal with the dead. If the art world is so uncongenial to him, why be an art critic? There's more than one way of being a critic, and it never was a choice between being a sycophant or Witchfinder General, ambulance-chaser or monkish scholar.
I went to art school in the early 1970s, and have, for over 25 years, spent a considerable amount of time teaching in art colleges. I have taught many artists, and many others have been teaching colleagues. I've curated shows. For a long time, I tried to be an artist myself. Naturally, I am on good terms with many artists. When I started writing for the Guardian I thought to ditch all my friends and acquaintances and move into a hotel, but somehow it didn't work. The noise from the bar was too loud. I tried making myself as obnoxious and objectionable as possible, in life as well as print, but that didn't work either. I cannot undo my relationships, or live another life. But then, I'd rather have a life than a career.
One final observation: although I am on amicable terms with some other critics, I realise I have no friends at all in the newspaper world. I take care to keep a distance, in case I get compromised or corrupted, or turned into a hack.
