In 1999, I said Yoko Ono’s art would never make it big. I was so wrong | Vanessa Thorpe

This week Tate Modern is presenting the largest ever exhibition of work by the woman I wrote off after interviewing her

Twenty-five years ago, I predicted a low-key future for the world-famous person I had just excitedly interviewed; a woman once at the centre of the avant& garde, but still regularly pilloried in popular culture.

Well, as it is fashionable to admit a failure of judgment, I can now say I was quite wrong about what lay ahead for Yoko Ono. “Today,” I pronounced in 1999 for this newspaper, “it is pretty clear that her art will never be seen as establishment, or even be commercially owned, in the way that the work of many of her New York contemporaries has been appropriated by the mainstream”. Embarrassingly, I also felt the need to convince readers that Ono had once been highly rated by the art world, before her identity as a Beatle’s wife consumed her.