Massive Links! Miscellany Edition

Left: Larry Gagosian (image nymagazine) Right: Jeff Koons, Hanging Heart, 1994 – 2006, one of five versions, each uniquely colored, high chromium stainless steel with transparent color coating and yellow brass, 106 x 85 x 40 in. Image copyright Sothebys.com

• MoreIntellegentLife features a great profile on mega dealer Larry Gagosian, rounding up a number of observations by art world personalities on the man,

“I have one word for him: fearless,” says Irving Blum, an LA collector and one-time dealer.

Another collector who would not be named qualified that judgment a little: “I don’t know that he’s fearless. What I would say is, he is a person impossible to insult. You could say anything: he’ll call you again. He’s determined. He’s incredibly tenacious.”

Even if Gagosian is the art world’s best businessman, “he’s not a salesman,” says Jerry Saltz, art critic at New York magazine. “You don’t see him working the floor. He’s like a visitor from another planet, an extraterrestrial trying to communicate with our species.”

Even if he is an opportunist, “his opportunism is transparent,” says Peter Schjeldahl, art critic of the New Yorker. “It’s not underhand: it’s all overhand. He is not complicated. He’s like a shark or a cat or some other perfectly designed biological mechanism.”

Even if he is a dealmaker, he is one with rare panache: “Larry enjoys these different types of transactions, that type of energy,” says the artist Jeff Koons. “It’s kind of like a sexual energy.”

Brilliant.

• Anyone checked out the number of gallery openings this week on ArtCal? There’s too much to see. My own list will include checking out the weird plastic chair at Sikemma Jenkins and contemplating whether I like Liam Gillick’s new show at Casey Kaplan this Thursday. Friday recommends are new media based; Rhizome’s New Silent Series in which Trevor Paglen will discuss his work at the New Museum, and Vertexlist’s, Blankly Perfect Summer, an exhibition showcasing emerging talent from Krakow.

• Frieze asks artists, critics, and curators to cite books that influence them in a new web series titled Ideal Syllabus, and manages to get, Nicholas Bourriaud author of Post Production and Relational Aesthetics is their first list maker. Probably the most interesting books included on that list to me were Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, and Ubik by Philip K Dick — both incredibly dude-y novels, and very easy reads relative to his own work. As a side note, I find it amusing that Post Production and Relational Aesthetics, two of the most influential texts to the art world, have virtually no reader reviews on Amazon.

• In other random news, I was on the Charles Cowles website yesterday, an activity of note only because the site sucks.