It was the Friday afternoon of Memorial Day weekend on Further Lane, the best street in Amagansett, the best town in the Hamptons, and the art dealer Larry Gagosian was bumming around his eleven-thousand-square-foot modernist beach mansion, looking pretty relaxed for a man who, the next day, would host a party for a hundred and forty people. A pair of French bulldogs, Baby and Humphrey, waddled about, and Gagosian’s butler, Eddie, a slim man with a ponytail and an air of informal professionalism, handed him a sparkling water. Gagosian sat down on a leather sofa in the living room, his back to the ocean view, and faced a life-size Charles Ray sculpture of a male nude, in reflective steel, and a Damien Hirst grand piano (bright pink with blue butterflies) that he’d picked up at a benefit auction some years back, for four hundred and fifty thousand dollars. On a coffee table before him was a ceramic Yoshitomo Nara ashtray the size of a Frisbee, decorated with a picture of a little girl smoking and the words “too young to die.”

Gagosian is not a household name for most Americans, but among the famous and the wealthy—and particularly among the very wealthy—he is a figure of colossal repute. He is dubious of art dealers who refer to themselves as “gallerists,” which he regards as a pretentious euphemism that obscures the mercantile essence of the occupation. He has always favored a certain macho bluntness, and calls himself a dealer without apology. With nineteen galleries that bear his name, from New York to London to Athens to Hong Kong, generating more than a billion dollars in annual revenue, Gagosian may well be the biggest art dealer in the history of the world. He represents more than a hundred artists, living and dead, including many of the most celebrated and lucrative: Jenny Saville, Anselm Kiefer, Cy Twombly, Donald Judd. The business—which he owns without a partner or a shareholder or a spouse or children or anyone, really, to answer to—controls more than two hundred thousand square feet of prime real estate. All told, Gagosian has more exhibition space than most museums, and he shuttles among his outposts on his sixty-million-dollar Bombardier Global 7500 private jet. He’s been known to observe, with the satisfaction of Alexander the Great, “The sun never sets on my gallery.”

Traditionally, the model for dealers has been to bet on raw talents, and support these artists until work by some of them sells well enough to cover the bets made on all the others. Under the mega-gallery model that Gagosian pioneered, the top dealers don’t even bother with nascent artists. He has said plainly that an artist must achieve certain sales metrics before he’ll consider getting involved. Ellie Rines, who runs 56 Henry, a small gallery on the Lower East Side, told me, “What I can do that the big galleries can’t is that I spot someone who has potential. I say, ‘There’s something brewing here—the actual work may not be good, but there’s something tingling, it’s getting at something.’ ” Gagosian is content to let people like Rines do the wildcatting. Once they’ve discovered an unknown and nurtured her into a valuable commodity, he can lure the artist away with promises of more money, more support, and a bigger platform. When contemporaries describe Gagosian, they tend to summon carnivore analogies: a tiger, a shark, a snake. His own publicist once described him as “a real killer.”

The languid calm that he exuded on the eve of the Amagansett party was that of a predator between meals. At seventy-eight, he remains tall and broad-shouldered, with a full head of white hair that he keeps trimmed close to the scalp, like a beaver pelt. Gagosian has blue eyes, which often flash with mirth—he has a quick, salty sense of humor—but they can just as suddenly go blank if he feels threatened or wants to be inscrutable. In conversation, these abrupt transitions from easy bonhomie to enigmatic hostility and back again can be jarring.

“I vow to recount every weird dream I have with a generous amount of detail.”

Cartoon by Hartley Lin

“I have a weakness for entertaining,” Gagosian told me. At seven the following morning, he explained, trucks would arrive with garden furniture, and his staff would mobilize. There would be barbecue. Pizza baked in an outdoor oven. An Aperol-spritz bar and a gelato truck. Even as a child, Gagosian recalled, he liked to “have people over to my place,” and to his many friends and customers and sycophants the yearly swirl of “Larry parties” has become its own exclusive social calendar. In addition to the Memorial Day party, there is a Labor Day party, also in Amagansett; a dinner at Art Basel, in Switzerland, every June; a one-night-only exhibition at Casa Malaparte, a cliffside house in Capri; birthday parties and pre-release film screenings and opening-night banquets; a New Year’s bash at his place in St. Barts; and a pre-Oscars party at his home in Los Angeles. The sheer magnitude of his overhead is a source of envy—and confusion. His close friend Glenn Fuhrman, a financier and art collector, told me, “I’ve had so many conversations with other dealers over the years who are just dumbstruck that Larry could possibly be making money. They say, ‘I know how my business works—I don’t understand how he could be making a profit.’ ”

Gagosian vets each guest list with the vigilance of a night-club bouncer. Of the Memorial Day festivities, he said, “There’s nobody invited that I didn’t approve.” The crowd, he explained, would consist of “billionaires, artists, neighbors—mostly people I really know and am close to.” A pause, a wolfish grin. “Or want to be close to.” Derek Blasberg, a writer and fashion editor who has held a staff position at Gagosian’s gallery since 2014, told me, “Larry is a full-time gallerist and a part-time casting agent. He knows how to pull the right mix of people from worlds that are financially lucrative and creatively inspiring.” Blasberg is known for his friendships with models and actresses, which he chronicles on a popular Instagram feed. Often, Blasberg told me, Gagosian will call him and say, “I saw you with So-and-So. Can you invite them?”

A Gagosian party requires adroit curation. Too many billionaires and it’ll be as dull as Davos; too many artists and celebrities and who’s going to buy the art? Some years ago, a staffer planning a dinner for a Richard Prince opening wrote in an e-mail to colleagues, “Before Larry approves this list he would like to know if you have sold any art to these people.” That list included actors (Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio), fat-cat art collectors (Steve Cohen, Henry Kravis), and models (Gisele Bündchen, Kate Moss). Models are important, Gagosian once explained, because they “look good at a dinner table.”

The beach house’s front door opened and Anna Weyant, Gagosian’s girlfriend, entered. She is petite and blond and was wearing oversized sunglasses and holding a half-finished beer. Her hair was wet and she greeted him warmly.

“Were you swimming?” Gagosian asked.

“Yeah,” she said, smiling, before disappearing upstairs.

At twenty-eight, Weyant is half a century younger than Gagosian. She is also one of his artists, and her work has sold at auction for more than a million dollars. One painting, an eerily sensual oil portrait of an upside-down young woman who is sticking out her tongue, hangs in the vestibule, between a Prince and a Twombly.

Gagosian has been so successful selling art to the masters of the universe that somewhere along the line he stopped being their servant. “He’s one of them,” Andy Avini, a senior director at the gallery, told me. In fact, for much of Gagosian’s clientele he is less a peer than an aspirational figure.

Unlike many luxury items, art works tend to be unique objects—“one of one,” in the parlance of the trade. The designer Marc Jacobs told me, “Larry sells things that aren’t for sale.” Typically, the most coveted items become available only when the previous owner dies, or gets divorced, or goes bankrupt. An élite dealer like Gagosian, however, can sometimes wrest away a treasure by offering the owner—ideally someone he knows—a whopping premium. If you want the right kind of Jasper Johns to round out your collection, you enlist Gagosian to help you find one hanging on somebody else’s wall, then make the owner an offer he can’t refuse. If he does refuse, double the offer. Then, if necessary, double it again. It is the super-rich equivalent of ordering off-menu.

Gagosian isn’t the first to pull off this transposition. He is a big reader, and one of his favored subjects is the life of Joseph Duveen, the great dealer who helped assemble the collections of Andrew Mellon, J. P. Morgan, and other Gilded Age titans. There are several biographies of Duveen, Gagosian informed me, and he has “read ’em all.” According to one of them, by S. N. Behrman, Duveen made a point of “showing his multimillionaire clients that he lived better than they did.”

Numerous friends of Gagosian’s cautioned me not to mistake the merry-go-round of parties and galas and superyacht cruises for a life of sybaritic leisure. The dealer and collector Tico Mugrabi, who has made many deals with Gagosian, said, “The guy is always working, even when he’s having fun. This motherfucker works 24/7.” The British painter Jenny Saville, the most expensive living female artist, who has worked with Gagosian throughout her career, concurred: “Even if he’s having dinner, or if he’s on holiday on a boat, it’s not a holiday. All the fun dinners—they have a reason for being fun.”

Gagosian’s longtime friend Jean Pigozzi, a photographer and collector, described the parties as marketing showcases in disguise. “Larry’s a genius at finding these guys, then he brings them to his house, and people say, ‘Oh, perhaps I should get a couple of Picassos.’ ” Once, Pigozzi recalled, he was at Gagosian’s Manhattan home with the French billionaire Bernard Arnault, and Arnault expressed enthusiasm for some art on display. “I told him, ‘Everything here is for sale. Don’t be nervous. You want to buy the chair? You can buy the chair. You want to buy the painting? Just ask! It’s all for sale.’ ” Gagosian insisted to me that he does not “sell art out of my house,” then allowed that he actually has. A true dealer knows that everything has a price, and the best way to raise the price of something is to say that you would never sell it.

As Gagosian likes to point out, he didn’t start life as an insider. He came of age in the San Fernando Valley, in a middle-class Armenian American family. His father, Ara, was a municipal accountant who later retrained as a stockbroker. The family never went to museums or emphasized the visual arts. But Gagosian’s parents both dabbled in show biz, performing in an Armenian theatre troupe, and his mother, Ann, had a small role in “Journey Into Fear,” a 1943 movie that was produced by Orson Welles. Once, when Gagosian asked his mother what Welles had been like, she revealed that he’d taken her out for coffee. “And I said, ‘O.K., I don’t want to know any more,’ ” Gagosian recalled with a chuckle, adding, “My mom was attractive.”

It wasn’t a happy childhood. Ara “liked to gamble, I think more than he should,” Gagosian said, and also “drank probably more than he should.” Gagosian rebelled as a teen-ager, and he told me that it was hard for his father “to discipline me, in a certain way, because his life didn’t seem particularly disciplined.” Most of Ara’s stockbroking, Gagosian said, seemed to consist of “trying to talk his relatives into buying securities from him.” (Gagosian has a sister, Judy, who declined to be interviewed for this article.) One peculiarity of Gagosian’s origin story, at least in his telling, is that his early years had a notable deficit of the quality that has come to define his life: ambition. He attended U.C.L.A., where he studied English, joined the swim team, and did a little photography. But he dropped out twice and took six years to graduate. It was the sixties, and he was in no hurry: he was a good-looking guy who liked chasing girls and playing pool and getting stoned with his pals. There was a brief, ill-considered marriage, in Vegas, to a college girlfriend, Gwyn Ellen Garside. They divorced after sixteen days. It was “stupid” to marry so young, Gagosian says now. In the divorce papers, Garside explained that she’d married him with the false understanding that they would “have children” and “both work and save to be self-supporting and to build a future together.” Gagosian’s aimlessness was so pronounced that his father once said, in exasperation, “If you just do something with your life, I’ll buy you pot.” (In 1969, the year Gagosian finally graduated, Ara died, of lung cancer. He was fifty-nine.)

After college came a string of menial jobs: in a record store; in a grocery store; the graveyard shift at a gas station. Then, through a cousin, Gagosian became an assistant at the William Morris Agency, answering phones and reading scripts. But he hated the airless corporate environment and the jockeying of his colleagues, likening the experience to “a knife fight in a phone booth.” He has occasionally suggested that he was fired by William Morris, but when I spoke to Michael Ovitz, who supervised him there, he insisted that Gagosian quit. “I tried to get him to stay!” Ovitz recalled, adding that he thinks Gagosian could have made a formidable agent. He noted of art dealing, “The vocations are similar. You’re buying and selling.”

Gagosian started working as a parking attendant in Westwood. He didn’t mind the job, he says: it paid better than the ninety dollars a week he’d made at William Morris. Then one day, in a moment now enshrined in art-world lore, he noticed a street vender selling posters at the edge of the parking lot. If Gagosian possesses one secret weapon that has equipped him for success, it might be his disinhibition. He approached the vender. The posters were “schlock,” Gagosian told me—a kitten toying with a ball of yarn and other images you might find on the wall at a pediatrician’s office. But they seemed to be selling. So Gagosian proceeded to, in his words, “copy the guy’s business.” The posters came from a company called Ira Roberts of Beverly Hills, and Gagosian started buying directly from the firm and selling on his own. Art was an arbitrary choice, in his account: “If he’d been selling belt buckles, I might’ve tried to sell belt buckles.”

By adding a cheap frame, he discovered, he could sell a two-dollar poster at a considerable markup, for fifteen bucks. He leased a little patio on Broxton Avenue, in Westwood, and sold framed posters to passersby. Gradually, Gagosian’s slacker instincts gave way to a more hard-nosed entrepreneurialism. He began letting local craftspeople sell leather goods and painted trinkets on the patio, in exchange for six dollars a day and ten per cent of their gross. In an optimistic flourish, he bestowed a name on his ad-hoc enterprise: the Open Gallery. In 1972, Gagosian told the Los Angeles Times, “It’s sort of a halfway house, halfway between having to be in business for yourself and being a stone-freak-do-nothing hippie.” Eventually, he hired a few people and moved indoors, opening a proper shop on Broxton. One early employee was the musician Kim Gordon, who, before she formed the band Sonic Youth, assembled thousands of picture frames for Gagosian. In a 2015 memoir, Gordon recalled him shouting at her when she worked too slowly, and noted, “He was erratic, and the last person on the planet I would have ever thought would later become the world’s most powerful art dealer.”

Cartoon by Jared Nangle

Ara Gagosian might never have made much money, Larry told me, but he always had “a nice car in the driveway.” At the start of Larry’s ascent, he also projected an image of success that was out of proportion to how well he was actually doing. From his first days in the business, stories circulated about unpaid bills, creditors chasing him, a repo man showing up for his car. Doreen Luko, an early staffer in L.A., told me that on payday Gagosian’s employees “literally ran to the bank in hopes that there would be money there for our paychecks—whoever got there first was going to get paid on time.” Mike Shatzkin, a U.C.L.A. classmate with whom he lived for a period during the seventies, told me that Gagosian sometimes walked out of a restaurant without paying the check. “I did it with him once, but it was a thing he did,” Shatzkin said. (Gagosian denies this.) One detail that has gone largely unreported in chronicles of Gagosian’s career is that, in 1969, he pleaded guilty to two felony charges of forgery, stemming from his use of someone else’s credit card. The card was “being passed around by a bunch of my friends,” he told me. “It was a stupid mistake.” He received a suspended sentence and probation.

Sensing an opportunity to make a bigger mark, Gagosian began carrying fine art, mostly prints and photographs. The actor Steve Martin told me, “When he had his poster shop in Westwood, I went in. I was a novice art collector and he was a novice art dealer.” Martin and other young Hollywood types who were starting to collect would get drawn in by something in the window and find themselves in conversation with the eager, gregarious proprietor. 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.” One day in the mid-seventies, Gagosian was paging through a magazine and came across a series of photographs he liked—moody black-and-white shots by the New York photographer Ralph Gibson. Gagosian cold-called Gibson and announced, “I’ve got this gallery.” How about a West Coast exhibition?

“In those days, I was selling prints for two hundred dollars,” Gibson told me. “So I said, ‘O.K., but you’d have to buy three or four as a guarantee.’ ” Gagosian flew to New York with a check. Gibson was represented there by Leo Castelli, the legendary dealer who had nurtured the careers of Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, and Roy Lichtenstein. “In those days, Leo was just the Pope,” Gibson recalled. He introduced Gagosian to Castelli, and “Leo took a liking to him.”

Castelli, then in his late sixties, had grown up in Trieste and come to America during the Second World War. A debonair man with courtly manners, he was a lifelong art lover who didn’t become a full-time dealer until he was middle-aged. He spoke five languages and was so devoted to his artists that he supported many of them with generous stipends. Gagosian began spending more time in New York, and cultivated a friendship with the older dealer over long lunches at Da Silvano. The photographer Dianne Blell once joked that Gagosian chased Castelli around “like a puppy.” At one point, Gagosian presented him with a gold Patek Philippe watch. Patty Brundage, who spent decades working for Castelli, told me, “Leo was always looking at other people to kind of keep him new, to make him vital, and I think Larry was one of those people.” In “Leo and His Circle,” a biography by Annie Cohen-Solal, Gagosian posited that his impatience with art-world pretense may have endeared him to Castelli: “I did not do a lot of blah-blah-blah. I think my bluntness appealed to him.”

One day, Castelli and Gagosian were crossing West Broadway when Castelli greeted an unassuming-looking gentleman in his fifties who was walking by.

“Who was that?” Gagosian asked.

“That was Si Newhouse. He can buy anything he wants.”

Gagosian doubled back and introduced himself. “Give me your number,” he suggested, without an ounce of blah-blah-blah. It was one of the most fateful introductions of his life.

Castelli specialized in what is known as the primary market: he guided the careers of living artists and sold their new work in exchange for a commission. He took pride in spotting talent in chrysalis. “When I first saw the work of Johns and Stella, I was bowled over,” he told an interviewer in 1987. Castelli, who said that he dealt art chiefly “because of its groundbreaking importance,” regarded the commercial side of his profession as secondary. When Gagosian initially ventured beyond poster-hawking, he had no relationships with artists, so he couldn’t be a primary dealer in the Castelli mold. But what he did have was a gallery in Los Angeles, access to an untapped ecosystem of West Coast collectors, and something that Castelli decidedly lacked: chutzpah. The art dealer Irving Blum knew both men during this era, and he told me, “Leo was really aristocratic and civilized. And Larry”—he laughed—“Larry was a tiger.” Castelli, who had no gallery of his own in California, began consigning works to Gagosian, including pieces by Frank Stella. Gagosian established a reputation for showing top artists who already had representation in New York. “I’m a very bad salesman and Larry is a very good salesman,” Castelli conceded, with a gentle caveat about his more brazen protégé: “Of course, he wouldn’t be as scrupulous as I am in advising one of my clients not to buy a painting because it’s not good enough for them.” He added, “He also knows how to deal with very rich people.”

In pursuing a very rich clientele, Gagosian carved out a different niche from Castelli’s—one that harked back to Duveen’s relationships with the robber barons. The secondary market involves the buying and selling of previously owned work. Castelli had little interest in it, and in the mid-twentieth century—when Americans were creating the most dazzling art—the secondary business was perceived as a backwater by some dealers. It was also considered a bit distasteful: Duveen had often supplied his nouveau-riche clients by obtaining Old Master paintings from noble European families that had fallen on hard times.

By the nineteen-eighties, however, a new generation of wealthy Americans was eager to assemble great collections—and what they desired most was contemporary art. Si Newhouse had a media empire, and for more than three decades he was the owner of this magazine. (His family still owns Condé Nast, the parent company of The New Yorker.) He was also obsessed with twentieth-century art. On Saturday mornings, a car ferried him from his town house, on East Seventieth Street, to the galleries of SoHo. He had a sharp eye and a ready checkbook, and before long Gagosian could be seen squiring him on these excursions.

While Gagosian was on the rise, he occasionally championed promising young artists. When he saw the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat for the first time—at a 1981 group show in SoHo, organized by the dealer Annina Nosei—he bought three pieces on the spot. The following year, he mounted Basquiat’s first show in L.A., where he had opened a bigger, nicer gallery. (Basquiat stayed at Gagosian’s house in Venice, along with Basquiat’s girlfriend at the time, a not yet famous Madonna.) But the main service that Gagosian provided for Newhouse wasn’t scouting out the primary market; it was being his detective on the secondary market. The œuvres of even the most renowned artists are inconsistent. Masterpieces are rare and often hard to find. No central registry records the owners, locations, and prices of art works. Being a good secondary dealer requires knowing which people are collectors, where they live, what hangs inside their houses—and whether they might be induced to part with any of it. Gagosian excelled at what Douglas Cramer, a soap-opera producer and an early client, once called “the hunt.”

Like a secret society, the art market was governed by obscure social codes, and Gagosian was so unbound in his energies and so shameless in his tactics that he immediately attracted notice and controversy. The telephone was his instrument of choice, and he often made upward of a hundred cold calls a day, sniffing out the location of an art work, lining up buyers, then haggling with the owners until the work shook free. The artist Jeff Koons, who first encountered him in this period, and went on to work with him for many years, told me that the young Gagosian infused the market with a thrilling sense of possibility: significant art that had been “locked up” suddenly became accessible. One reason that Gagosian knew where so much noteworthy twentieth-century art was hidden is that he had access to a treasure map, in the form of Castelli. “I could give him a lot of information on where the paintings were,” Castelli once acknowledged. “Because I sold most of them.”

Nosei told me that, during Gagosian’s parvenu years, he sometimes talked his way into parties and showed up at dinners to which he wasn’t invited. When we met in Amagansett, he mentioned that, in the eighties, he’d ventured into the house we were sitting in while the owner was throwing a party. Friends he was staying with at the time were invited, he told me, so he tagged along. “There wasn’t a place for me at the table, so I ate over there,” he said, indicating a side garden. He developed a reputation for wandering away from the festivities at private homes, taking clandestine Polaroids of any impressive art that he spied on the walls, and then offering those works to his collectors. A few days after a party, he would telephone the hosts and startle them with the news that he had a buyer who was very interested in the Matisse above their living-room sofa. His hunger, aggressiveness, and stamina were so conspicuous that people in SoHo began referring to him as GoGo.

Gagosian has denied surreptitiously photographing art works and offering them for sale without authorization, but there is ample evidence that he did just that. Douglas Cramer told the Times, “I was in Larry’s office once and I saw Polaroids of pieces that were in my home.” Indeed, a version of this gambit (minus the Polaroids) remains part of Gagosian’s repertoire. Marc Jacobs told me about a dinner he once hosted at his apartment in Paris; among the guests was Gagosian. Several days later, Gagosian called Jacobs and proposed buying two paintings in the apartment—a John Currin and an Ed Ruscha. As it happened, Jacobs was about to build a new house, in New York, and needed money, so they quickly came to terms. “The deal was he would pay immediately,” Jacobs recalled. “Somebody came and picked up the paintings three days later, and the money was in my account. Done.”

In 1985, Gagosian relocated to New York and opened a gallery on Twenty-third Street, in Chelsea, which at the time was considered a deeply inauspicious location. (He has always possessed a genius for real estate—the investment paid off handsomely.) It can be difficult these days to recall how polarizing a figure he was when he first swept into the city. Then, even more so than now, people wondered about his finances: How could he afford to live so lavishly and pay so much for pictures? Did he have a secret backer? Gagosian has always denied it. (Newhouse, for his part, said that he was not Gagosian’s backer, but he once noted, “There are moments when I wish I were.”) Rumors circulated—without any apparent foundation—that Gagosian might be fronting for arms merchants, or in league with drug traffickers. His sudden success had prompted hostility and suspicion in the business, and he portrayed the scuttlebutt as a calculated effort to undermine him. In a 1989 interview, he lamented that “people don’t have anything better to do than make up gossip,” adding, “I’m not going to stop making money to squelch rumors.”

One widespread story at the time was that Gagosian liked to make lewd telephone calls to women. In a 1986 diary entry, Andy Warhol alluded to these accounts, writing, “Larry, I don’t know, he’s really weird, he got in trouble for obscene phone calls and everything.” (In the 1996 book “True Colors: The Real Life of the Art World,” by Anthony Haden-Guest, Gagosian responded, “He called me weird. Warhol!”) The gossipy art magazine Coagula once expressed surprise that such allegations hadn’t slowed Gagosian’s ascent, noting, “Despite persistent rumors about dirty money and dirty phone calls, Larry Gagosian continues to fill his stable with big names.”

During this period, Gagosian developed an enduring reputation as a Lothario. He dated many glamorous women, including the model Veronica Webb and the dancer Catherine Kerr; he and Kerr were briefly engaged, but days before the wedding he called it off. (“Cold feet.”) On more than one occasion, he told people, “When women meet me, they either want to fuck me or throw up on me.” An item from Coagula in 1995 described a woman who allegedly called the police because Gagosian had been sending “a chauffeur-driven limousine to her pad every night, which patiently waits for her to emerge, kidnapping-style.” (Gagosian denied to me that he ever did this, pointing out, “It’s expensive to send a limousine.”)

“Your screenplay is amazing. It’s fresh, original, like nothing we’ve ever seen before, but we can fix that.”

Cartoon by Matthew Diffee

“Talk to anyone you want—talk to people who don’t like me, I don’t care,” Gagosian told me when I first proposed writing about him, before catching himself and saying that maybe I shouldn’t talk to his “ex-girlfriends.” When I mentioned that I might be duty-bound to do so, Gagosian gave a little laugh, looked at me without blinking, and said, “I hope you have a good legal department.” He dismissed the stories about obscen