BBC Four: Cattelan's work often seems to operate on the level of a joke - the sculpture of a granny in a fridge or the squirrel which committed suicide. How seriously should we take him?
Ben Lewis: Incredibly seriously. As seriously as we take Steve Bell as a cartoonist. As seriously as we take Woody Allen as a director.

BBC Four: Someone suggests in the programme that Cattelan has an almost medieval sensibility - that he is a modern Harlequin, both hilarious and cruel. I felt there was something in that.
BL: I thought so too. He's like the fool in King Lear, the one person who's paid to tell people what it's really like. The trouble with art theory is that you come to a point where you realise it's complete and utter nonsense. I still like art, but we have to admit that this is a really big problem. It's such a problem that you can put a donkey in a gallery as a work of art about how you're an idiot and it can still be a great work of art. That's what that the film is about. I'm saying, "Hi, I'm Ben, I love art but I know there's something wrong. Maybe I shouldn't like art. And here's this guy who's my biggest problem. I love art, but why on earth do I like him?"

BBC Four: Did you come to any conclusion by the end?
BL: No, I don't think you can resolve the illogical structures underlying the apparent rationality and reasonableness of life, or Western society or whatever. I don't think you can reconcile it but I think it's good to draw people's attention, which all my films do, to the point where logic breaks down.

BBC Four: I liked the way you paralleled Cattelan's playfulness in how you approached him - he wouldn't meet you for an interview and sent a proxy, so you effectively sent a proxy in the form of one of his artworks.
BL: Well artists are always putting themselves above reality, always saying, "I'm better than reality, I'm so clever I can take a bit of reality, copy it exactly, put it in a gallery and then it's art!" Because I come from reality and I'm not an artist, that's another one of the little logical problems that really piss me off and I thought, "This is a great opportunity, I'm going to come from reality and I'm going to turn his art, that he's just copied from reality, back into reality. That'll get him."

BBC Four: He seemed quite perplexed by you confronting him wearing a Maurizio Cattelan-style head.
BL: He's a conceptual artist and I'm a conceptual human [laughs]. I think the head was perhaps a step too far. That was very scary. I don't think he particularly liked the head and he certainly didn't like getting cornered like that. But at the end of the day, sod it, I wanted to meet him so I did it.

BBC Four: We see some of his reaction in the programme, but did he talk to you after that?
BL: No, that was the sum total of the interview. He was very nice to my charming German assistants, of the female variety, he was most taken with them, and I unfortunately had to take up a back position after I'd done my bit. But he's kind of charming and Maurizio is like his art, he's nervous, shy, avoiding contact, avoiding being pinned down. He's really like that. Most of the artists in these films have very curious psychology.

BBC Four: His art certainly has an effect on people. I was reading that The Ninth Hour, his sculpture of the Pope, was attacked in Poland by two Catholic MPs.
BL: They're brilliant works of art, aren't they? They really put their finger on something because you can't quite pin down, "Why is the Pope hit by a meteorite? Is it proof that God doesn't exist? Is it proof that chance determines our fate? Or is this a revenge of God against the evil papacy?" You can never quite work out what it means. I think that is one of the very important things that he does - he shows the difference between art and language. Because language always carries meaning but art is an image, it can be unsure, it can mean the opposite of itself.

BBC Four: Why do you think it is that there are no works by Cattelan in British public galleries?
BL: Not to my knowledge. I just don't think they fancy spending $200,000, which is the minimum, on one of his works of art. But I also think British art became very nationalistic in the worst possible sense, racist is actually the word, in the Nineties. The three letters YBA are not so far from BNP and I think there was a mad kind of Britishness, totally inappropriate for the global cultural economy in which we live and I think that great artists like Cattelan got a little bit overlooked in Britain. Although he was in the Royal Academy with the Pope a year after Sensation, so he has got a look in. But I think it's quite difficult, once you start taking artists like these on board, once you start saying Cattelan you start comparing him to Damien Hirst and, well, I suppose I should leave that with you or the viewers…where does that leave Damien? How does his work compare in intellectual complexity with Cattelan? You tell me, answers on a postcard.