"Answer some silly questions," I say. To, of all people, Philip Monk. If you know him at all, you know him as the famously un-silly curator of the Power Plant in Toronto, but the art-world denizens I'd been interviewing had described him variously as "the virgin," as "Chairman Mao--he likes to have women around him," as "Mr. Slope" (a particularly oily clergyman from Trollope's novel Barchester Towers), as a "brainiac," and in one memorable phrase, as "having the appearance of an over-masturbated seminarian."

Not a promising field for silliness. But he waits patiently for the questions. "If you could have your portrait done by any artist in history," I ask, "who would it be? And if your life were made into a film, what actor or actress would you choose to portray you?"

We are sitting in the back patio of Tango Palace, a coffeehouse on Queen Street East, not far from where he lives. He turns his head slightly to the right, which I have learned to understand as thinking mode. He presents a severe profile, square-jawed and resolute. Slim and in shape (he bikes a lot), he looks considerably younger than his 51 years--though a small crease of flesh at his neck hints at the dowager to come. The long-ish red hair is a mess. It always is. But somehow it is always a mess in precisely the same way, as if even messiness must defer to an overarching fastidiousness.

He turns back to me. He has an answer. "Velazquez," he says, then stops. Thinks again. Finally: "No. Francis Bacon, with a Velazquez in the background. Although," he adds, "the portrait genre is one I don't have faith in." "And the actor?" I prompt. "Not Ed Harris," he says, referring to the star of the recent Jackson Pollock bio-pic. A pause. Then, with obvious delight, "Derek Jacobi. He played Francis Bacon in the film Love is the Devil, and the action was mainly represented as taking place in his head."

Ah, I think. I have had my first Monk-y moment. I offer him nonsense. He pulls it together into a theme. Pure head-theatre.

Here are the basics. Philip Monk, described today by several in the art world as the best curator in the country, is born in Winnipeg on June 14, 1950, the son of a Lutheran clergyman with liberal sympathies and a commitment to native land claims and third-world aid projects. He has an older sister. He attends Grant Park High School, then begins studying architecture at the University of Manitoba. "I eventually realized I didn't want to spend years designing air-conditioning ducts," he says, so he switches majors, and graduates in 1972 with a BA in English. He takes a year off and travels in Europe, returns to graduate school in Toronto, earning his master's degree in art history in 1978. He becomes a writer, principally of art criticism. Eventually accepts a position in 1985 as curator of contemporary Canadian art at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Leaves in 1994 to become curator at the Power Plant. Is in a relationship with artist Shelagh Alexander for many years, a relationship formalized as a marriage in 1994. They have no children. They separate recently--he moves out; she gets to keep the cats. He is currently dating Louise Bak, a writer, broadcaster, wheat-grass aficionado and sometime dungeon mistress. He is a vegetarian. He practises yoga.

A classic nerd trajectory? I would have put money on it. I could see him in high school, I thought, a pale young man, weak, bookish, hopeless at sports, unpopular with boys and girls alike. And I would have been wrong--at least according to Andy Patton, a Toronto artist and teacher who was a year behind Monk in that Winnipeg high school, and remembers him as "not a nerd at all. He wasn't unpopular. He played defence on the hockey team. He could have passed as normal if he'd wanted to, but he had no interest at all in being liked, in being a teenager. He didn't accept the ideology, and that made him much more of a troublemaker than those who simply misbehaved. To someone a year younger, that was very appealing."