Artists pray for the ideal patron: civilised, entertaining, and basically rolling in it

Don't be so patronising. Well, actually, do. Private views at public galleries are usually full of relatives of the artist, hacks, Official Friends whose annual subscription guarantees them an invite, hangers-on and people who have wriggled in for a free drink. However, private views at private galleries are full of potential clients. And it is these clients, not reviews, magazine features, new buildings, Lottery money or the Turner Prize, who make the contemporary art world thrive. Patrons really are crucial.

At Angela Flowers's east London gallery this month, the doyenne of figurative art and contemporary painting held one of her regular "dinner openings". It's a clever ruse. Sitting, eating and talking around a work will magically endow it with more meaning (and, with any luck, a red dot) than swiftly walking past while clutching a glass of Chardonnay ever can. Downstairs, Flowers East is hung with the meditative, monochrome paintings and drawings of Ken Currie, where figures and trees loom out of a twilight world. Upstairs, there are geometrical prints by Bernard Cohen.

In the middle of the white space on the ground floor, Flowers, who has been running her business since the 1960s, holds her dinners. This evening, Currie is there and so are Flowers's clients, along with a smattering of art historians and a few hacks, presumably for levity. I am sitting next to Currie, who is sitting next to the Canadian financier Irving Ludmer, the artist's friend and collector, who has come over with his partner Freema for the show. How many Curries does he already own?

"Seventeen, I think," says Ludmer. He and Freema are staying at the Lanesborough on Hyde Park. While their trip was planned primarily to coincide with this exhibition, he has also taken in a bit of London culture, namely the Persians at the British Museum, the National Portrait Gallery and Death of a Salesman. He also accidentally went to Wimbledon. "A cabby took me there by mistake," he explains affably. Ludmer, civilised, entertaining and basically rolling in it, is the sort of collector I imagine artists yearn to have as their patron.

He tells me that when he arrived at the party - that is to say, about 40 minutes ago - he decided to buy a Currie triptych, price £50,000. However, while eating his dinner - that is to say, about 14 minutes ago - he changed his mind. Instead, he decided to buy a single canvas. Happily for Currie (and Flowers), this one was also priced at £50 grand. What will he do with it? "Probably give it to a museum," Ludmer says.

"I see Irving as a guarantor of my work," says Currie, who spent two years in his Glasgow studio creating this exhibition. A glass is tinkled; Currie is urged to say a few words. "I knew this was coming," he mutters. Travelling down to London for this show is like coming out of his bunker, he says. After revealing what he has been doing, he will go back into what he calls his "cave", and stay there for another two years, painting layer upon layer of deep black and ghostly white, producing haunting pictures with a terrifying and nihilistic undertow. Then he will emerge to hang another 20 or so canvasses at Flowers, his dealer, which will, he hopes, sell a few to the likes of Irving Ludmer at dinner.

What does Ludmer gain from it, apart from a keen philanthropic glow? "Art is about the pursuit and appreciation of beauty. And the alleviation of pain," he pronounces. "All the rest is bullshit."

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