Hockney, Rushdie

That's what I call a triumph. Alison Jacques, the visionary gallery owner whose reputation for discovering the best new British artists is second to none, staged a retrospective of an American photgrapher who has been dead for 15 years - and provoked a press scrum which made the premiere of Bridget Jones look like a quiet night at the Barnsley Odeon.

There must have been 50 paparazzi, scrambling for angles, as the whole of London 's art world funnelled into Alison's show on Clifford Street .

Her brilliant coup was not just to assemble the best retrospective ever made of Robert Mapplethorpe's iconic photographs, many never seen before in this country, but to commission Britain 's greatest artist to curate it.

I couldn't get close to most of the pictures, of course. The room was so densely packed that we could only shuffle towards one wall and then ebb away. It was like being swept along in the rush for the Selfridges sale.

The show is open until mid March, and I shall certainly be back more than once, to examine the pictures in a calmer mood. Mapplethorpe portrayed people and objects as sculptures: he seemed to freeze them. I glimpsed one image of Arnold Schwarzenegger that made the muscle man look as if he was chiselled from marble, but I couldn't get close enough to understand how the effect was achieved: it's a technique that requires crystal-hard focus and brittle lighting.

I've painted all my adult life. Because I couldn't decide whether I wanted to be an artist or a rock star, I became neither. Mapplethorpe became both - he didn't bother to make music, because that wasn't the attraction of rock stardom... he just wanted to live with maximum decadence at 200mph.

He paid the price, dying of Aids in 1989. I'm thankful that my own forays into hedonism in the New York of the Seventies spurred me to discover a spiritual life instead. I think back to the parties and the excess, and I know I was lucky to get out unscathed.

David Hockney blazed through that white-hot era too. He might look like a meek and timid mixture of Alan Bennett and Woody Allen, but he's lived at a pace that would make today's pop stars wilt.

Alison manouveured me through the throng to meet him, and I instantly saw what has protected him from the perils of a scene that snuffed out so many of its stars: Basquiat, Bruce Chatwin, Mapplethorpe himself and, of course, Andy Warhol.

Hockney exudes innocence. He has the aura of a child. When a spoon was produced as a challenge to me, it bent like plastic - I felt Hockney's innocent energy flowing all around the metal. That's a phenomenon I usually associate with my visits to schools and children's hospitals, but Hockney is nine years older than me.

It was hard to make conversation in that raucous atmosphere, but I sensed he was not a small-talker anyway. Many painters are not: they express their ideas in images, not words. Warhol, whose portrait is probably the best known in the exhibition, was an impossible man for a chat: you might as well talk to a cat.

His personality was an enigma which I could not decypher - he possessed a mysterious soul. When he looked into my eyes, I felt he could penetrate everything I thought, stabbing straight through my brain and out the other side. I've tried to do it myself when I'm practising telepathy, but it's impossible: I always become ensnared in the emotions and memories that I sense.

I don't believe anyone ever read Warhol's mind. His thoughts seemed to have a radiation shield around them.

Reading Alison's mind wasn't hard, though. She was clearly enjoying the night of her life, and I was thrilled for her.

It's rare to find a successful celebrity who behaves with downright rudeness. I invite it, of course, because I bound up to strangers with as much enthusiasm, so my wife says, as most people show when they spot a school friend after 20 years. Hanna says she's surprised more people don't turn their back on me, but I believe that only a chronically unconfident character would try to signal their social superiority by being rude without provocation.

Most celebs don't lack confidence. I remember that Julian Clary once shut a door in my face as I greeted him, but I later realised he was going through an appalling time - when we met again he was a delightful man, though there's a sadness in his eyes that I suspect will never leave him.

So when I hailed Salman Rushdie at a party, I wasn't expecting him to flick a glare from beneath his hooded eyes and turn his shoulder to me.

If you're going to brush me off, you'll need to be more determined than that. I seized his hand and spun him towards me as I shook it - he stared at me for a couple of seconds, as Shipi's camera clicked, and then he declared he was too busy to talk to me.

I'd been about to tell him that I'd been spellbound by The Ground Beneath Her Feet, and that I was looking forward to devouring his latest novel, Fury. I don't feel like reading it now.

But the front pages held the answer - Iran's extremist religious leaders have repeated their call for Rushdie's assassination. He must be living every minute in the knowledge that a bullet could end his life.

Under that pressure, I don't imagine I'd be much fun at parties either.