Cool, cerebral and formidably focused, Mark Jones hides his erudition beneath an easy affability. In his six years as director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, he has overseen the transformation of a venerable if quaintly eclectic institution into one of Britain’s most dynamic and ambitious museums that is rarely out of the headlines.

As the V&A celebrates a century and a half since its founding in South Kensington, Jones is determined to keep the focus on the museum’s original mission – to bolster the best of British design.

Recent headlines have not always been friendly: the V&A has come under sneering attack over its Kylie Minogue exhibition, and Jones has been accused of dumbing down, pandering to pop culture. Unruffled, he insisted that the V&A, like all museums, must broaden its views and its range of visitors. Next summer the V&A will host a similar glitterand-dresses extravaganza devoted to the Supremes.

“The V&A has had some troubled history – but most things work best when they are aligned with the core purpose,” Jones says. “[The museum’s main founder] Henry Cole’s perception was that he was creating good designers, but that never works if you don’t have knowledgeable consumers.”

The museum set out to educate the public on styles and design from the 19th century onwards. Exhibitions have presented art nouveau, Art Deco, the arts and crafts movement, Modernism, and most recently, Surreal Things, on Surrealism and design.

“They are meant to be like chapters in a book,” Jones said. “Next we will do Cold War Modern, with competing visions of Modernism from the Soviet Union and the United States.” In 2009, to fill in some gaps, will be Baroque.

Jones argues that the Kylie show looked not at a pop star’s trivia, but at brands, design and street style. “Kylie was everywhere but the person nowhere,” a reviewer noted. Keeping a straight face, Jones compared this to the Versailles of Louis XIV – the creation of an artificial persona.

But he does not scorn the need to bring in the crowds. At heart he is a showman with a determination to make museums central to the national culture. Since he arrived from the National Museums of Scotland, visitor figures have more than doubled to more than 2.5 million a year. Art Deco, the most visited exhibition, attracted 360,000 visitors. Late opening on the last Friday of each month has at times brought in up to 11,000 people, attracted by free catwalk shows and music.

The V&A is also running through the list of important but lesser known influences on art and design. The output of James “Athenian” Stuart, an overlooked contemporary of Robert Adam, was recently on display. He will be followed by Thomas Hope, Horace Walpole (to coincide with the reopening of his Gothic Twickenham house Strawberry Hill in 2010) and William Kent.

The opening crowd for Kylie, Jones admits, was different from that for Stuart. But museums should be fun as well as instructive: “I want to show beautiful things beautifully so that people can enjoy them. I’m bored with the idea that people should only go to a museum to be better educated. Why shouldn’t they go for pure pleasure?”

The V&A, he says, lost its way in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when it tried to become an art museum. It could not compete with the great collections of Old Masters. Today, this would be an even bleaker aim – British museums have tiny acquisition budgets compared with the vast sums spent by American and other museums. “The Seattle Museum has been given $1 billion worth of art by 52 private collectors. How could we compete against that?”

One way, he suggests, is to change the tax system so that such donations would not be taxed. The Treasury as well as the Opposition agreed in principle, and he is hoping for change. “At present you can get tax relief if the donor is dead but not if he’s alive,” he points out.

The other way, he argues, is to focus on the V&A’s niche. It is enormously rich in holdings. “Britain is fortunate in having a small number of institutions – the V&A is among them – which have an international reputation. It is important for the collections of the future that we are internationally known so that we can keep up.” He adds: “There are so many new museums with little in them. Others are rich in collections but poor in cash – such as the Hermitage.” They missed chances to acquire important things. “I’m not saying we should hang on to everything. But this is a prosperous country. Surely to goodness we can spend a small amount of money to buy things.”

Is the V&A moving into global branding? The Louvre has just opened a branch in Abu Dhabi. Would he follow suit? “I dread the terminology,” he says. But he has embraced the idea. The museum has formed partnerships with museums in San Francisco, Bombay and Beijing. Its name, fame and brand are important selling points.

Nowadays the V&A tries to ensure that each exhibition is seen in at least three different venues. In any one year there are six in Britain and six abroad.

For a short while it seemed that Jones would be joined at the V&A by John Tusa, who accepted the job as chairman of the board before withdrawing on the grounds of a conflict of interest. This was a blow to the museum and for Jones, who had welcomed Tusa’s “passionate commitment” to the arts.

However, like Tusa, Jones has been something of a media star with a knack for extracting cash from rich donors. He has launched a £110 million plan to transform most of the main galleries, one by one. It started with the £31 million British Galleries in 2001 and others have followed, to great acclaim: the Jameel Gallery of Islamic Art, opened by the Prince of Wales last year, the John Madejski garden and the Michael and Dorothy Hintze Sculpture Galleries alongside it. Other new galleries will include paintings, prints and drawings, sacred silver and the Royal Institute of British Architects and V&A architecture gallery.

The next big project is the £30 million Medieval and Renaissance galleries, opening in 2009. Jones is impatient with its critics. “Why do we feel we need to belittle the achievements of the past? When we did the Gothic exhibition, people said they would not come because the medieval age was dirty, nasty and horrible. There seems to be an idea of linear progress. But that just isn’t true. Powerful women, for example, were better off in the time of Eleanor of Aquitaine than under Cromwell.”

He has little time for the notion that museums are better run by administrators than scholars. A flash of passion shows through his erudite, analytical manner: “More and more things in life are run by people whose job is to be an administrator. It cannot be right to prize that skill above all others. The primary purpose of institutions becomes to run themselves.” Good museums, on the other hand, know when they are doing something right because people come.

Jones should have no worries. Millions of visitors are proving that the Victorian showcase is doing a pretty good job.

Editor's choice

• The top 10 fan versus band scuffles
• Mamma Mia! The first review
• Times critics' 20 best films for kids