The Lost Minotaur: The world of Larry Gagosian

Durand Ruel - this was around the time of the French Empire. Leo Castelli -this was during the time of the beginning of the US global dominance.

Larry Gagosian - now and here and for how long?

Art in the time of mass production, in the time of overflow of the markets by all sorts of commodities, how difficult is it to maintain a gallery profile and still sell a lot of high profile art. A one billion worth of art per year? Is this a fair estimate or advertising kind story? A $40 million Bombardier Global Express private jet and a personal chef on call at Madison Avenue headquarters - not bad for a world of art, is there many dealers who can afford this, or just Larry Gagosian alone? Gagosian already became a legend. It there any art gallery in the history who has had 11 branches? I guess no one. Can you imagine contemporary art world as it is without Larry Gagosian? It's either too hard either impossible at all. How much money did he attracted to art simply because of his marketing talent, forget the art? Is it half of this billion? Some people fuel industries by their passion and energy some people becoming the faces of the industries. Larry Gagosian is the most important art dealer of today. It's like IKEA of the gallery world, difficult comparison of course. Shall i compare it to Ferrari, bur Ferrari despite all designer efforts is not a really profitable company. Gagosian is already a historical kind of person. Will his artists last long? What going to happen with the highly speculative prices paid for non-proven by time new art? Will the entire pyramid of Los Angeles born Armenian descent crush down one day? It's hard to imagine yet. Mr. Gagosian has a plenty of powerful backers, those people will always have the money, and i guess they going to continue to spend huge amounts on art. But the day Larry Gagosian will go i doubt his gallery will stand - too much of everything is attached to his powerful personality. There will be new dealers and new galleries, but will anyone match Gagosian or we will ever know him as the only emperor of the gallery world.

If Lady GaGa was a painter, how happy would we be

Just open your eyes and look at this, she (Lady GaGa) has 10.000.000 (ten million) followers on Twitter http://twitter.com/ladygaga. It's like a whole population of country like Belarus following her. Not too bad  Just for comparison. Gerhard Richter, arguably one of the greatest painters of our times has 5000 followers on Twitter. No, just 4627 as of today just to be clever http://twitter.com/gerhardrichter 

What both of them doing? Both producing images at some extent. Both making a lot of money from their art. Is Lady Gaga true pop artist like Warhol and Gerhard Richter is a true aristocrat like a British Queen. But wait British Monarchy has 185,339 followers on twitter, a bit more.

Interesting question arise. How did with such a little interest of general public in art, it still commanding such prices at the auctions, $10,000,000, $40,000,000 for contemporary art isn't surprising sum.

Is billionaires most caring people about art, just those who finally got little bit more time to understand it? Or it's just a fashionable toy, such expensive and lucrative toy for a few. Wait some more statistics. Both, Nicholas Serota and Glenn Lowry having around 1000 Google searches a month, Gerhard Richter has 60,500, Damien Hirst has 135,000 and Lady Gaga, ok well 25,000,000, ah, and Van Gogh has around 2,240,000 those interested in his art and biography. Mozart by the way is not forgotten as well, 3,350,000 searched for his name is not a small amount. But Lady Gaga topped him 10 times. What a power of marketing.