We’re in a former industrial space, now the A Foundation’s gallery, on Greenland Street, Liverpool. Before us are two large objects: one a cylinder, open at both ends, the other a kidney-shaped hollow, like a swimming pool. Both are finely crafted in wood – by Simparch, an American artists’ collective – and are proving popular with the skateboarders who’ve been invited to make the most of these perfect, skate-friendly structures (skateboarding having begun with Californian kids having fun in empty swimming pools).

And fun it certainly is. The skaters are enjoying themselves. The audience – local arty types and others from further afield, as this is the night of Liverpool’s Turner Prize do as well as the A Foundation’s private view and after-party – are enjoying watching them. So, it’s win-win, this moment. But, as the cliché goes, is it art? James Moores is head of the A Foundation – and the reason why all of us, skaters and punters alike, are here – but he doesn’t answer my question so much as bat it away as an irrelevance.

“There is a great problem in contemporary art,” Moores declares, “in that the conceptual process has almost turned into a litigation about meaning. A piece of art can’t be appreciated without the script that goes with it. I’m drawn much more to art that communicates directly with the senses or the consciousness, without some sort of clerical intermediary. So, the question about whether it’s art or not is less important than whether it’s beautiful or a pleasure.” Which is where Simparch and the skateboarders come in.

James Moores comes from what you might call a big Liverpool family. Hugely wealthy from the profits (and eventual sale) of the Littlewoods Pools and department-store empire, over the years the Moores have owned chunks of both Liverpool FC and Everton (where James’s cousin David was chairman until earlier this year). When Liverpool Poly was renamed in 1992, it became Liverpool John Moores University, after the philanthropic paterfamilias and founder of the family fortune – estimated to be more than £1 billion last year.

To his grandfather’s chagrin, young James opted to go to art college – first Camberwell School of Art, then Goldsmiths – rather than joining the family business. He still paints today, when he has the time. “It’s very much my intention to get back into some studio practice,” he says, sounding as if that might not happen any time soon. That’s partly down to having four children. But even more than the family life he enjoys with his partner, Diana, it is his work with the A Foundation – the organisation that now channels his charitable money into the arts, most especially in Liverpool – that looks likely to get in the way of Moores’ painting ambitions for now.

He quashes any idea of dutiful philanthropy, though he does cite one of the city’s disadvantages during its postwar decline as the fact that “those who’d made their fortunes here had got titles or stately homes by this time. They didn’t want to be associated with the dirty hands of industry or trade – and certainly not slavery. So Liverpool was deprived of civic leaders, such as the Gladstones, Walkers or Levers, in its hour of need.”

The Moores, sprung from a later generation of local grandees, have never really left – James lives between Liverpool, London and Stroud – but he characterises his initial involvement with the city more as a desire to have a good time than to do paternalistic good works. “I left Liverpool when I was 13 or 14, when my parents split up and moved south with my mother. Part of my getting involved was a desire to reconnect – and have fun.” That reconnection began with James joining the board awarding the John Moores Award for painting, begun by his grandfather.

Next came the Biennial, the international festival of contemporary art he launched in 1999, which he describes as a “frantic” moment in his life, “dragging together different parties to try to make it happen and running round trying to persuade, cajole or bully people into releasing buildings for exhibition space”. In the middle of all that, he also bought, on a whim, the former Rochelle School in Shoreditch, East London – now a gallery and studio space for artists and designers like former squeeze Luella Bartley and Gareth Pugh.

But it is Liverpool where Moores has truly made a difference, beginning with the Biennial, from which he withdrew when its success was assured and one of its most controversial projects, Antony Gormley’s sculptures on Formby beach (shown on page 75), became a much-loved local landmark. “The initial impetus was that, while the city had great galleries – the best outside London – they were very short of money and had become inward-looking,” rather like Liverpool itself, during its decline. “They were not appreciating that there was a bigger world out there that they should be engaging with, and that with the proper engagement with that world, the resources would surely follow.”

Public servants, toiling away in cash-starved institutions back in the Nineties, could be forgiven for feeling a moment’s resentment at the can-do attitude of a rich man whose very name opens doors (and, yes, exhibition space) in Liverpool. But both the Biennial (which helped secure Capital of Culture status) and the A Foundation demonstrate the role private patronage can play in the sphere of public culture. Institutions “have a hard time moving forward in a dynamic fashion,” Moores declares, “because everything has to be decided by committee or according to political correctness”. In contrast, at A Foundation, “the buck stops with three trustees: my sister, Portia Kennaway, and my mother, Jenny Moores”.

So, when Liverpool won its Capital of Culture bid, the powers that be at A Foundation “decided it would get on and do things”, buying the buildings on Greenland Street as “a cornerstone” for an Artists’ Quarter, where the city’s artists and others lured in from around the world could work, as well as spend time in local schools, “so children can see that creative practice is a viable life choice”.

As with the Biennial, Moores’s aim here is “to enable this to be self-generating”. He’s not, he is keen to explain, a one-man band. “A lot of people in Liverpool have invested a lot of effort, both emotionally and financially.” He is ambitious for his home town, though. He’d like it to be a great cultural hub, just as it was once a great port. “Liverpool connects with Ireland, Scotland and Wales in a way that no other city in England can.” For these countries to use it “as a conduit, a communication node to connect globally is my dream”. A believer in the power of art to transform the individual, he is also keen for the city to have the kind of impact on the art world that it has long enjoyed in music and literature. “The Liverpool temperament is well suited to contemporary art,” he argues. “It plays with ideas, flips things over and never takes things at face value. When the Liverpool intelligence is applied to art, it’ll do great things.”

Drum’n’basin, Simparch’s commission for A Foundation, and three other new commissions are at the Greenland Street space until April 20

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