Art Dealers

I first heard about Larry Gagosian in reference to his brief stint at the William Morris Agency, working under Michael Ovitz¹. I was studying the career of Ovitz at the time, who I found to be endlessly fascinating, both for the reputation that he built over the years as Hollywood's go-to fixer, but also because he was a man of many second acts and he had an eclectic taste².

In any case, I didn't think much of Gagosian, especially since I wasn't really that interested in the art world, and also because I was just preocccupied with other things. Until of course somebody recommended the New Yorker profile of Gagosian to me.

As I've come to accept, I'm a huge sucker for a good profile. My favourites from the New Yorker archive are many (this one about Marlon Brando, by the ultra-talented Truman Capote is a standout). And so I devoured the Gagosian piece.

What a cool person!

Knowing nothing about the contemporary art market (or the one for Old Masters), I didn't have a good scaffolding to appreciate the profile, but I could see from my readings about 'media players' that Gagosian was special, and as I wrote in a piece for Mortimus:

[he was a] "nobody who drove his eighteen-wheeler straight into the establishment’s heart"

... which attracted me to him because I love stories of outsiders making it big.

So today I've decided to lay down some of my working thoughts on Gagosian, the art market, art dealers, collectors and more, as a way to think about my own curiosity about this wonderful part of the world.

As I was reading through that New Yorker profile, there's a section that I immediately remember highlighting:

Gagosian had no training in art history, but the business he’d stumbled into was one for which he was preternaturally suited. He had a keen sense of aesthetics and design, and what fellow-connoisseurs describe as a near-photographic visual memory. He also was a quick learner. “Next to his bed, he had these stacks of art books,” a woman he briefly dated around this time, Xiliary Twil, recalled. “He was really studying.”

Naturally I wondered what art books he had next to his bed, and I also wondered - what art books are next to my bed? I don't have any education in art at all. My knowledge of art is surprisingly lacking. I didn't have an option to take art history in school (not that I would have liked it, Laurier isn't really known for producing great scholars of art). And frankly speaking art always had a bit of an elitist whiff to it. When you think of snobs, an art snob does easily come to mind.

Regardless, being the hoarder of books that I am, I realized that my personal library was lacking great introductory books on art (and I needed a jolt to my own sense of design and aesthetics) — I decided to fix the issue.

Cue the book spree.

Footnotes

1. The details are a little hazy here, Gagosian may have worked alongside (or in the same office as) Ovitz. The New Yorker profile claims Gagosian was Ovitz's assistant. ↩

2. Ovitz on how he built his taste: "I'd bring takeout food upstairs and listen to [Martin Scorcese], and ask him questions. It was like taking a Masters degree in film. That's where I learned he knew every old director.Marty educated me. I did a lot of reading. I knew about those old directors. I had all of our people trained in the history of film and television. I bought every book that was published, including one about the history of the Emmys which listed all the Emmy awards, and I made our people watch every film in the history of the Academy Awards that won best picture, best actress, best actor, best director, and best writer. They got familiar with the actors: Who's Gary Cooper? Who's Robert Mitchum? Who's Lana Turner? Who are these people and what did they contribute? By doing that, our people were so fluent in our business. They could talk television, movies, music. They knew the history because past is prologue. If you know history, you can pretty much predict the future." ↩