If one were seeking unique curses to place upon enemies, “May you be profiled by Patrick Radden Keefe” would be an especially potent choice. Keefe, a staff writer for The New Yorker and author, has written with devastating precision about various individuals, including the Sacklers, a wealthy family who profited from America’s opioid epidemic; Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the Mexican drug-cartel kingpin known as “El Chapo”; and Gerry Adams, the Irish Republican activist turned politician.
In comparison to these subjects, Larry Gagosian, the global art-market king and the focus of Keefe’s latest profile, receives relatively lenient treatment. While acknowledging that Gagosian’s peers often use carnivorous analogies to describe him (“a tiger, a shark, a snake”), Keefe vividly portrays a man who played a significant role in transforming fine art into an asset class. Gagosian reduced the world’s greatest works of art to mere “stock lists, packing orders, lines on a piece of paper,” treating them as valuables to be stored in Swiss vaults rather than appreciated or enjoyed. However, Gagosian also emerges as someone who genuinely cares about art and has made substantial contributions to its development and promotion over the past fifty years.
This profile reminded me of one of my favorite exhibitions, “The Steins Collect,” which I had the pleasure of seeing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York a decade ago. The exhibition showcased stunning works, including canvases by Matisse and Picasso. What made it particularly fascinating was the presentation of the artists in dialogue with Gertrude Stein and her siblings, who, as collectors with both financial resources and an interest in innovative works, exerted significant influence over emerging movements like Cubism. Although the exhibition has long since concluded, you can gain some insight into its themes by reading the accompanying hardbound book.
As a regular reader, you may have expected the Gagosian profile to inspire me to seek out more biographies about artists. However, it actually reminded me more of “Liar’s Poker,” a book by Michael Lewis about Wall Street in the 1980s, which I have revisited multiple times. (I wonder what Lewis, who studied art history as an undergraduate at Princeton before pursuing careers in finance and journalism, would make of Gagosian.)
I will be going on vacation next week, which means the Interpreter will be on hiatus. Since I have two young children, vacations are not typically a time for leisurely reading by the pool. Nevertheless, I am confident that I will be able to squeeze in some novels here and there, as I always do. I am particularly excited to finally read “The Guest” by Emma Cline, a book that has been on my reading list for quite some time.
Novels have a tendency to evoke strong emotions in me, so there is a risk that the book’s dark portrayal of the ultra-wealthy beach enclaves in the Hamptons may cast a shadow over my trip to a coastal suburb in Spain, which is not at all affluent. However…
2023-08-11 08:52:49
Link from www.nytimes.com