Where is Neal now? One possibility ;-)
I just read an article in the 7/4/16 issue of The New Yorker magazine that strongly reminded me of what Neal might have become post-series under a new alias.
The article is called "Swimming with Sharks" and is about a man named Loïc Gouzer, who is thirty-six and Swiss, and has worked as a modern art specialist in the art auction world (London and New York, Sotheby's and Christie's) for most of his career.
Below I have included excerpts from the article that struck me as how Gouzer could be a version of Neal Caffrey - you know, one that's chosen to go "straight" (aka work legally), but is still pushing boundaries, chafing against authority (especially in the forms of convention and tradition), exercising his love of risk-taking (physical and "work"-related), using his people skills, and his talent for creative thinking. And his love and knowledge or art, naturally :-)
I'm not sure how long the New Yorker keeps links to its articles available to non-subscribers, so if you want to read the whole article (recommended :-) then you'll want to do so soon. Otherwise, enjoy the excerpts under the cut :D
[bolding for emphasis added by me]
Youth
“He was a troublesome young man,” said his mother. “He was very turbulent as a child, and as a teen-ager, and had trouble accepting authority and regulations.” He evaded national military service by exaggerating a back injury.
When Gouzer attended an art fair in Basel in his teens, he pretended to be a scion of the Sonnabend family - important dealers of twentieth-century art. “I think any pro dealer would have said, ‘There is no Sonnabend kid with a French accent,’ but other younger ones would say, ‘We might as well answer his questions,’ ” Gouzer says.
During a trip in East Asia, Gouzer and his friend Guillaume Barazzone went to Ulaanbaatar, with plans to travel around Mongolia. Barazzone recalls that Gouzer noticed two women in a bakery. “In ten minutes, he had convinced these two Norwegian girls to come with us,” Barazzone told me. “He decides he wants something, and in five minutes he got these two girls, in the middle of nowhere. So that completely changed the face of the trip.”
When Gouzer returned to Geneva, he organized a sale of Chinese works of art at a local gallery, encouraging family and friends to buy pieces. Gouzer told me, “My dad said, ‘Who do you think you are? We can’t just buy the first artist you like - this is a lot of money!’” A few years later, a painting that Gouzer had recommended came to auction and sold for eight million dollars. “I remember taking the catalogue and showing it to my parents and saying, ‘See, you should have bought the entire studio instead of yelling at me,’” he says.
Now
Gouzer was dressed with cultivated dishevelment - well-cut blue suit, crisp white shirt, open at the neck, red Adidas sneakers, a scruff of beard. [OK, not exactly Neal, but a possible version, yeah? :-)]
On a table, a small wooden box, lined with orange felt, contained a blown-glass vessel reminiscent of a Christmas ornament. It was a 1964 work by Marcel Duchamp, titled “50 cc of Paris Air.” Gouzer picked it up with nonchalance; his associates flinched as he examined it from various angles, until it was safely returned to the box.
Gouzer’s boss at Christie's, Brett Gorvy, said, “Loïc has a tendency to be emotional and petulant, like a child. You want to slap him across the face, in a way. It’s part of his charm.”
Gorvy, who works in the adjacent office, said, “There’s a glass panel above the door, so when my door is closed I will see this guy pogoing, this head popping up, to get my attention.”
Adventurousness is Gouzer’s personal brand. He surfs off Montauk, where he has a house. (He also rents a penthouse in Chelsea.) He flies to remote islands to go spearfishing with a gang of guy friends. Gouzer is an adept user of Instagram and his account could be curated by Anthony Bourdain: Gouzer in a wetsuit, underwater, well within snapping range of some sharks; Gouzer on a tropical beach, holding a dead dogtooth tuna up to his shoulder, as if it were a rifle. As a fashion spread that he recently did for L’Uomo Vogue confirmed, Gouzer, who is unmarried, has the looks of a movie star.
“Loïc has a solid will and determination, he is hardworking, he is imaginative and nonconformist,” François Pinault said. “His personality is a mixture of toughness and melancholy.”
Career
Gouzer was highly entrepreneurial in his attempts to develop new collectors. In 2006, when Russia’s new wealthy class was emerging, Gouzer and Alex Rotter (a colleague at London Sotheby's) took to Moscow a dozen works that were soon to be auctioned in New York. They rented out a space in a luxury mall. “Loïc was, like, ‘Let’s make it into a party,’ ” Rotter said. “It was a big space, and it was very valuable art - Richard Prince, Jeff Koons - worth tens of millions of dollars. We had disco lighting, strobe lighting. One of the pieces was a Richard Prince ‘nurse painting’” - a series of works inspired by the covers of pulp novels. “Loïc had the idea ‘Let’s hire some nurses to stand next to the painting.’ So he found some ladies who dressed up as nurses for him.” Gouzer acknowledges, “I earmarked a tiny part of the budget for nurse waitresses.” But, he added, “it definitely didn’t go under that title on the financial debrief of the exhibition.”
Gouzer transferred to Sotheby’s New York office, in part at the urging of a girlfriend, who wanted to live in the city, and in part to be “closer to the central nervous system of the art world.”
Adam Lindemann, who owns the Venus Over Manhattan gallery, recalls, “I wouldn’t talk to him, because he was an underling at Sotheby’s. But I was looking for someone to ski with in Alaska, and he was the only person in the art world who would go.” By day, Lindemann and Gouzer skied on the Tordrillo glacier - “The game was to ski as fast as you can, and to crash into the other guy, and knock the other guy over,” Lindemann told me - and by night they talked about art. Not long afterward, Lindemann was planning a surfing trip to the Maldives with a hedge-fund friend who collected art. “I asked him if I could bring along a sidekick,” Lindemann recalled. “I asked Loïc if he wanted to fly to the other side of the world and surf, and he said, ‘Sure, no problem.’ There was only one small detail - that he had never surfed before.” Gouzer braved the waves, and has since become a creditable surfer. (His Instagram recently showed him catching a wave at Nihiwatu, an exclusive Indonesian resort.) “Loïc always has business in mind,” Lindemann said. “He knew that if he met me at a cocktail party and then spent the week with me skiing in Alaska that he would get my business.”
Some colleagues at the auction house criticized Gouzer’s lack of regard for long-established relationships. On one occasion, he was pursuing a painting, and identified its owner as a plastic surgeon, in Manhattan, who already had a relationship with someone at Sotheby’s. Gouzer called the surgeon’s office and made an appointment to have a mole removed. In the consulting room, he turned the conversation to art.
Traditionally, employees at auction houses court collectors for years, waiting for them to divorce, run into debt, or die-the so-called “three ‘D’s.” Gouzer is less patient. He dislodges works from collections through dogged persuasion, sometimes with substantial guaranteed prices backed by Christie’s or by a third party. Promising a minimum price at auction can coax an owner into selling, but it leaves the auction house vulnerable. Gouzer enjoys taking such gambles. Amy Cappellazzo, chairman of the fine-art division at Sotheby’s, says of Gouzer, “He has a very good appetite for risk.” Gouzer combines a mannerly European smoothness with a get-it-done, American-style bro-ishness. Christophe van de Weghe, a dealer and a friend, says of him, “He has the ability to talk about millions of dollars like it’s not that big of a deal.”
Gouzer told me. “It is not even cool to be a billionaire anymore - there are, like, two hundred of them.”
Gouzer has been unusually aggressive in challenging industry conventions, and has emerged at a moment when the sums being spent on art have become absurdly high.
Rotter told me, “He was my guy, in terms of driving me crazy, challenging me, and coming up with the most infuriating, ingenious ideas. A lot of the big art thinkers stand for the intellectual aspect of art. Loïc was always very clear: We sell art.” Gouzer began proposing deals that were structured with several contingent steps, involving multiple parties. “He was definitely the one saying, ‘How can this be done, and how can it be paid for?’ ” Rotter says. “Like, ‘He can’t pay now, but he’s paying with another art work, so let’s try to structure a deal.’ ” Such arrangements made intuitive sense in an era when many Wall Street fortunes were made by leveraging an array of arcane financial instruments.
Gouzer decided to explore failure. In an e-mail to senior colleagues, he explained, “The main idea behind this auction is that it is not a good idea, which is actually why we believe it’s a good idea. The art market is in a particularly weird place right now, between the doomsday scenario of the art bubble exploding in our face, the stock market collapsing, the interest rate shooting up, and the emerging economies being annihilated on the one hand, and on the other hand the reports of collectors splashing record amounts of money on Pollocks and de Koonings.” Failure, Gouzer wrote in his e-mail, “is creation’s best friend.” He went on, “All artists dread it, but at the same time that dread is necessary, and many artists made failure one of the central tenets of their work.” Gouzer proposed facing the uncertainty in the art market head on: “Let’s have fun making fun of the situation (and money as well).”
Gouzer threw a party. In previous years, he’s hosted gatherings at his apartment, which has spectacular floor-to-ceiling windows in its double-height living room, and a splendid deck with trees in planters and views uptown. This year, he rented Socialista, a bar above Cipriani Downtown, in SoHo, up a perilously steep staircase. A Cuban jazz band occupied one corner, and there was an open bar at the back of the room, which had ornate chandeliers and velvet couches. The party started at 11 p.m., and by midnight the room was filled with bearded young men in dark sweaters and willowy young women in heels. Leonardo DiCaprio slouched in an armchair, a newsboy cap pulled down over his forehead. Paris Hilton, long-limbed in a short, bedazzled white dress, looked like a swan sponsored by Swarovski.
Last November, a colleague at Christie’s brought to auction a Modigliani painting of a voluptuous woman, “Reclining Nude,” which had a presale estimate of a hundred million dollars. Gouzer posted an image of the painting on Instagram and offered this unscholarly observation: “Difficult to say which you would want more, the painting for a lifetime or the model for a night?”
Only one work failed to sell: a Sigmar Polke (a wooden frame covered with steel nails; to complete the piece, fresh potatoes were skewered on the nails). “The potatoes - if you want, feel free to get the potatoes for free,” Gouzer told reporters, offhandedly. “I’ll give them to you after the press conference.”
Gouzer’s events are sometimes dismissed as fake drama, since in many cases the works have been effectively sold in advance, either with a guarantee or with an informal understanding between collector and auction house. "It gives it an aura of momentum and celebrity and party-gives it a sex appeal,” Adam Lindemann said. At the same time, some observers suggest that Gouzer’s sales are flimsy marketing exercises, bestowing an insubstantial veneer.
Sandy Heller, the art adviser, told me. “Loïc is not theatre. Loïc is, like, bombs going off everywhere.”
He has a safecracker’s touch for what the atmosphere is like for the buying audience. “I relate it a lot to my spearfishing - you don’t know why, but you know that if you dive now the big fish is going to come,” Gouzer once told me. “When you’re at the surface, you don’t see anything, but you just have this instinct that it is going to happen. In art, it is the same thing - this instinct sometimes that I know a painting is going to move.”
“When I spoke with the consigner, he said, ‘What do you think the estimate should be?’ ” Gouzer remarked. “I said, ‘I don’t know.’ And I asked him, and he said, ‘I don’t know.’ So we just decided to wing it.”
During a soccer game: The transfer of players on and off the field happened swiftly, and the state of play was not always clear. On one occasion when Gouzer returned to the game, the ball was rolling in his vicinity, and he quickly stepped to claim it, dribbling and driving to the goal. A cry of outrage went up from the opposing team. Gouzer raised his hands, palms upward, as if to show that he had done nothing wrong. “What’s up?” he said, widening his eyes with affected innocence, and grinning. A few minutes later, when he was on the sidelines again, I asked whether the ball had been in play. Gouzer was leaning forward on the barrier, stretching his calves. He glanced over his shoulder and flashed a smile at me. “It’s borderline,” he said. “In case of doubt, it’s better to touch it.”
The article is called "Swimming with Sharks" and is about a man named Loïc Gouzer, who is thirty-six and Swiss, and has worked as a modern art specialist in the art auction world (London and New York, Sotheby's and Christie's) for most of his career.
Below I have included excerpts from the article that struck me as how Gouzer could be a version of Neal Caffrey - you know, one that's chosen to go "straight" (aka work legally), but is still pushing boundaries, chafing against authority (especially in the forms of convention and tradition), exercising his love of risk-taking (physical and "work"-related), using his people skills, and his talent for creative thinking. And his love and knowledge or art, naturally :-)
I'm not sure how long the New Yorker keeps links to its articles available to non-subscribers, so if you want to read the whole article (recommended :-) then you'll want to do so soon. Otherwise, enjoy the excerpts under the cut :D
[bolding for emphasis added by me]
Youth
“He was a troublesome young man,” said his mother. “He was very turbulent as a child, and as a teen-ager, and had trouble accepting authority and regulations.” He evaded national military service by exaggerating a back injury.
When Gouzer attended an art fair in Basel in his teens, he pretended to be a scion of the Sonnabend family - important dealers of twentieth-century art. “I think any pro dealer would have said, ‘There is no Sonnabend kid with a French accent,’ but other younger ones would say, ‘We might as well answer his questions,’ ” Gouzer says.
During a trip in East Asia, Gouzer and his friend Guillaume Barazzone went to Ulaanbaatar, with plans to travel around Mongolia. Barazzone recalls that Gouzer noticed two women in a bakery. “In ten minutes, he had convinced these two Norwegian girls to come with us,” Barazzone told me. “He decides he wants something, and in five minutes he got these two girls, in the middle of nowhere. So that completely changed the face of the trip.”
When Gouzer returned to Geneva, he organized a sale of Chinese works of art at a local gallery, encouraging family and friends to buy pieces. Gouzer told me, “My dad said, ‘Who do you think you are? We can’t just buy the first artist you like - this is a lot of money!’” A few years later, a painting that Gouzer had recommended came to auction and sold for eight million dollars. “I remember taking the catalogue and showing it to my parents and saying, ‘See, you should have bought the entire studio instead of yelling at me,’” he says.
Now
Gouzer was dressed with cultivated dishevelment - well-cut blue suit, crisp white shirt, open at the neck, red Adidas sneakers, a scruff of beard. [OK, not exactly Neal, but a possible version, yeah? :-)]
On a table, a small wooden box, lined with orange felt, contained a blown-glass vessel reminiscent of a Christmas ornament. It was a 1964 work by Marcel Duchamp, titled “50 cc of Paris Air.” Gouzer picked it up with nonchalance; his associates flinched as he examined it from various angles, until it was safely returned to the box.
Gouzer’s boss at Christie's, Brett Gorvy, said, “Loïc has a tendency to be emotional and petulant, like a child. You want to slap him across the face, in a way. It’s part of his charm.”
Gorvy, who works in the adjacent office, said, “There’s a glass panel above the door, so when my door is closed I will see this guy pogoing, this head popping up, to get my attention.”
Adventurousness is Gouzer’s personal brand. He surfs off Montauk, where he has a house. (He also rents a penthouse in Chelsea.) He flies to remote islands to go spearfishing with a gang of guy friends. Gouzer is an adept user of Instagram and his account could be curated by Anthony Bourdain: Gouzer in a wetsuit, underwater, well within snapping range of some sharks; Gouzer on a tropical beach, holding a dead dogtooth tuna up to his shoulder, as if it were a rifle. As a fashion spread that he recently did for L’Uomo Vogue confirmed, Gouzer, who is unmarried, has the looks of a movie star.
“Loïc has a solid will and determination, he is hardworking, he is imaginative and nonconformist,” François Pinault said. “His personality is a mixture of toughness and melancholy.”
Career
Gouzer was highly entrepreneurial in his attempts to develop new collectors. In 2006, when Russia’s new wealthy class was emerging, Gouzer and Alex Rotter (a colleague at London Sotheby's) took to Moscow a dozen works that were soon to be auctioned in New York. They rented out a space in a luxury mall. “Loïc was, like, ‘Let’s make it into a party,’ ” Rotter said. “It was a big space, and it was very valuable art - Richard Prince, Jeff Koons - worth tens of millions of dollars. We had disco lighting, strobe lighting. One of the pieces was a Richard Prince ‘nurse painting’” - a series of works inspired by the covers of pulp novels. “Loïc had the idea ‘Let’s hire some nurses to stand next to the painting.’ So he found some ladies who dressed up as nurses for him.” Gouzer acknowledges, “I earmarked a tiny part of the budget for nurse waitresses.” But, he added, “it definitely didn’t go under that title on the financial debrief of the exhibition.”
Gouzer transferred to Sotheby’s New York office, in part at the urging of a girlfriend, who wanted to live in the city, and in part to be “closer to the central nervous system of the art world.”
Adam Lindemann, who owns the Venus Over Manhattan gallery, recalls, “I wouldn’t talk to him, because he was an underling at Sotheby’s. But I was looking for someone to ski with in Alaska, and he was the only person in the art world who would go.” By day, Lindemann and Gouzer skied on the Tordrillo glacier - “The game was to ski as fast as you can, and to crash into the other guy, and knock the other guy over,” Lindemann told me - and by night they talked about art. Not long afterward, Lindemann was planning a surfing trip to the Maldives with a hedge-fund friend who collected art. “I asked him if I could bring along a sidekick,” Lindemann recalled. “I asked Loïc if he wanted to fly to the other side of the world and surf, and he said, ‘Sure, no problem.’ There was only one small detail - that he had never surfed before.” Gouzer braved the waves, and has since become a creditable surfer. (His Instagram recently showed him catching a wave at Nihiwatu, an exclusive Indonesian resort.) “Loïc always has business in mind,” Lindemann said. “He knew that if he met me at a cocktail party and then spent the week with me skiing in Alaska that he would get my business.”
Some colleagues at the auction house criticized Gouzer’s lack of regard for long-established relationships. On one occasion, he was pursuing a painting, and identified its owner as a plastic surgeon, in Manhattan, who already had a relationship with someone at Sotheby’s. Gouzer called the surgeon’s office and made an appointment to have a mole removed. In the consulting room, he turned the conversation to art.
Traditionally, employees at auction houses court collectors for years, waiting for them to divorce, run into debt, or die-the so-called “three ‘D’s.” Gouzer is less patient. He dislodges works from collections through dogged persuasion, sometimes with substantial guaranteed prices backed by Christie’s or by a third party. Promising a minimum price at auction can coax an owner into selling, but it leaves the auction house vulnerable. Gouzer enjoys taking such gambles. Amy Cappellazzo, chairman of the fine-art division at Sotheby’s, says of Gouzer, “He has a very good appetite for risk.” Gouzer combines a mannerly European smoothness with a get-it-done, American-style bro-ishness. Christophe van de Weghe, a dealer and a friend, says of him, “He has the ability to talk about millions of dollars like it’s not that big of a deal.”
Gouzer told me. “It is not even cool to be a billionaire anymore - there are, like, two hundred of them.”
Gouzer has been unusually aggressive in challenging industry conventions, and has emerged at a moment when the sums being spent on art have become absurdly high.
Rotter told me, “He was my guy, in terms of driving me crazy, challenging me, and coming up with the most infuriating, ingenious ideas. A lot of the big art thinkers stand for the intellectual aspect of art. Loïc was always very clear: We sell art.” Gouzer began proposing deals that were structured with several contingent steps, involving multiple parties. “He was definitely the one saying, ‘How can this be done, and how can it be paid for?’ ” Rotter says. “Like, ‘He can’t pay now, but he’s paying with another art work, so let’s try to structure a deal.’ ” Such arrangements made intuitive sense in an era when many Wall Street fortunes were made by leveraging an array of arcane financial instruments.
Gouzer decided to explore failure. In an e-mail to senior colleagues, he explained, “The main idea behind this auction is that it is not a good idea, which is actually why we believe it’s a good idea. The art market is in a particularly weird place right now, between the doomsday scenario of the art bubble exploding in our face, the stock market collapsing, the interest rate shooting up, and the emerging economies being annihilated on the one hand, and on the other hand the reports of collectors splashing record amounts of money on Pollocks and de Koonings.” Failure, Gouzer wrote in his e-mail, “is creation’s best friend.” He went on, “All artists dread it, but at the same time that dread is necessary, and many artists made failure one of the central tenets of their work.” Gouzer proposed facing the uncertainty in the art market head on: “Let’s have fun making fun of the situation (and money as well).”
Gouzer threw a party. In previous years, he’s hosted gatherings at his apartment, which has spectacular floor-to-ceiling windows in its double-height living room, and a splendid deck with trees in planters and views uptown. This year, he rented Socialista, a bar above Cipriani Downtown, in SoHo, up a perilously steep staircase. A Cuban jazz band occupied one corner, and there was an open bar at the back of the room, which had ornate chandeliers and velvet couches. The party started at 11 p.m., and by midnight the room was filled with bearded young men in dark sweaters and willowy young women in heels. Leonardo DiCaprio slouched in an armchair, a newsboy cap pulled down over his forehead. Paris Hilton, long-limbed in a short, bedazzled white dress, looked like a swan sponsored by Swarovski.
Last November, a colleague at Christie’s brought to auction a Modigliani painting of a voluptuous woman, “Reclining Nude,” which had a presale estimate of a hundred million dollars. Gouzer posted an image of the painting on Instagram and offered this unscholarly observation: “Difficult to say which you would want more, the painting for a lifetime or the model for a night?”
Only one work failed to sell: a Sigmar Polke (a wooden frame covered with steel nails; to complete the piece, fresh potatoes were skewered on the nails). “The potatoes - if you want, feel free to get the potatoes for free,” Gouzer told reporters, offhandedly. “I’ll give them to you after the press conference.”
Gouzer’s events are sometimes dismissed as fake drama, since in many cases the works have been effectively sold in advance, either with a guarantee or with an informal understanding between collector and auction house. "It gives it an aura of momentum and celebrity and party-gives it a sex appeal,” Adam Lindemann said. At the same time, some observers suggest that Gouzer’s sales are flimsy marketing exercises, bestowing an insubstantial veneer.
Sandy Heller, the art adviser, told me. “Loïc is not theatre. Loïc is, like, bombs going off everywhere.”
He has a safecracker’s touch for what the atmosphere is like for the buying audience. “I relate it a lot to my spearfishing - you don’t know why, but you know that if you dive now the big fish is going to come,” Gouzer once told me. “When you’re at the surface, you don’t see anything, but you just have this instinct that it is going to happen. In art, it is the same thing - this instinct sometimes that I know a painting is going to move.”
“When I spoke with the consigner, he said, ‘What do you think the estimate should be?’ ” Gouzer remarked. “I said, ‘I don’t know.’ And I asked him, and he said, ‘I don’t know.’ So we just decided to wing it.”
During a soccer game: The transfer of players on and off the field happened swiftly, and the state of play was not always clear. On one occasion when Gouzer returned to the game, the ball was rolling in his vicinity, and he quickly stepped to claim it, dribbling and driving to the goal. A cry of outrage went up from the opposing team. Gouzer raised his hands, palms upward, as if to show that he had done nothing wrong. “What’s up?” he said, widening his eyes with affected innocence, and grinning. A few minutes later, when he was on the sidelines again, I asked whether the ball had been in play. Gouzer was leaning forward on the barrier, stretching his calves. He glanced over his shoulder and flashed a smile at me. “It’s borderline,” he said. “In case of doubt, it’s better to touch it.”