Shala Monroque and Larry Gagosian at the Brooklyn Ball. They honored developer Bruce Ratner at the Brooklyn Museum’s annual Brooklyn Ball this past Thursday night and marked it with the opening of the Takashi Murakami retrospective. 
Left: Shala Monroque and Larry Gagosian. (Photo: Stefanie Keenan for Patrick McMullan) Right: Artist Ellsworth Kelly. (Photo: Brian Lindensmith for Patrick McMullan They honored developer Bruce Ratner at the Brooklyn Museum’s annual Brooklyn Ball this past Thursday night and the marked it with the opening of the Takashi Murakami retrospective.
Shala Monroque, Larry Gagosian, and Andy Valmorbida front row at "Warhol Factory X LEVI'S X Damien Hirst" Spring 2008 Collection at Gagosian Gallery. Fashion Week. The entertainment/social budgets get bigger every year. After the runway shows which are ostensibly in the Bryant Park tents, but are actually all over town, there are the parties--------
Gagosian the great
Aug 18th 2007
From Economist.com
Master of all he surveys (then sells)
THE king of the art world—a superlative title, perhaps, but Larry Gagosian just may deserve it. Each year ArtReview, an art journal, publishes a list of the industry’s top 100 movers and shakers in an attempt to assess who has the greatest impact on art’s value and reputation. Museum directors, auction-house owners, private collectors, dealers and even, occasionally, artists jostle for the top position. Mr Gagosian topped the list in 2004, and has lingered near the peak since.
In that triumphant year Mr Gagosian, New York’s leading dealer, had just opened his fifth gallery, in London’s Britannia Street, to balance his three in New York City, the one in Beverly Hills and his smaller space in London’s Mayfair. At 1,400 square metres, it is the largest and most splendid commercial gallery space in London. Its opening—Cy Twombly, a distinguished American artist, had been persuaded to create new work specially, and even Charles Saatchi predicted it would transform London’s art world—firmly established Mr Gagosian’s transatlantic dominion.
So what makes a successful dealer, and what is the nature of his power? Mr Gagosian is famous for his bold business dealings and glamorous lifestyle. He has a penchant for fast cars and beautiful women, and a vast home in East Hampton called Toad Hall.
Yet beneath this predictable exterior lies a true entrepreneurial instinct for the buying and selling of art. Mr Gagosian started his career, in Los Angeles, by buying posters for $2, framing them and selling them for $15. His energy in exploiting the possibilities of the secondary fine-art market in the early 1980s—buying and then reselling work by blue-chip modern and contemporary artists for a considerable profit—established his reputation, earning him the nickname “Go-Go”. Starting out in downtown New York in the mid-1980s doing historical shows, it was the lull in the art market in the early 1990s that offered Mr Gagosian his next opportunity. He began to represent living artists.
Driven and a workaholic, unafraid to bid aggressively at auction, he has a legendary capacity to drive up prices: fellow dealers enviously explain that he is consistently ahead of the game, always thinking about the next deal. Cristina Ruiz, editor of the Art Newspaper, has a judicious summation: “He loves the art—but he is one of those dealers who absolutely loves to sell, and he is very successful at it. Yes, he employs aggressive selling techniques, but that’s how dealers get stuff done.”
Todd Eberle
Cultural revolutionaryPerhaps his greatest achievement has been to win the trust of both artists and collectors. He represents the cream of contemporary American and many British artists. His arsenal of big names includes Richard Serra, Walter De Maria, Jeff Koons, Ed Ruscha, Howard Hodgkin and Rachel Whiteread. In New York he shows Damien Hirst, Douglas Gordon and Jenny Saville. Mr Gagosian also represents the estates of Andy Warhol, Willem de Kooning, Roy Lichtenstein and David Smith. Alongside these stars, he continues to show the work of lesser known artists, fostering the next generation.
As Mr Gagosian admitted in a rare public speech, one steady priority has been “to find or create a great space, a beautiful space, in which to show the art. You have to draw attention to yourself, to the gallery and to your artists.” Three of his galleries are by world-class architects—Richard Meier in Beverly Hills, Richard Gluckman in Chelsea and Caruso St John in Britannia Street—and the shows he creates in these remarkable spaces are knowledgably curated, equal in quality to fine museum exhibitions.
Another key priority has been the establishment of long-term relationships with serious collectors. As he has described it, he is averse to “transactional sales”, the one-off arrangement, and prefers “working steadily, over time, with collectors, and helping create or expand their collections.” He works closely with big-name collectors such as Charles Saatchi, Eli Broad, Si Newhouse and David Geffen.
Mr Gagosian is a master not just at selling, but, even more importantly, at selling to the right collector at the right price; for it is not just the deal that is at stake but the global market perception of that artist. For this reason Mr Gagosian avoids what he calls “impatient money”, which sees art only as a quick investment. It is this ability to understand art as a matter of love as well as money that has given Mr Gagosian so much power—not just to make himself a fortune but to shape the taste of a generation.
http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=9673257&fsrc=RSS
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