There are gallery owners (many) who dream of turning living artists into living legends, and there are gallery owners (a few) who won’t be bothered with anybody who isn’t a living legend. The nurture and maintenance of legends is a tricky, expensive business. Mary Boone is Mary Boone because she knows how to make this year’s scandal into next year’s old master. But then again, Julian Schnabel left Boone for the Pace Gallery on Fifty-seventh Street because he wasn’t becoming an old master fast enough. In the geography of reputations it’s easier to pass from uptown into eternity, or at least into the illusion of eternity that a sterling reputation provides. You’ll never turn an artist into a legend on the garbage-strewn streets of the Lower East Side. This is one reason why the scene there fizzled. And it’s infinitely easier to create a legend if the surroundings themselves are legendary. This is why the Gagosian Gallery, lately of West Twenty-third Street and definitely in the legend business (they deal in both the living ones and the recently deceased ones), moved to Madison Avenue last year.

Gagosian’s current space, in the old Parke-Bernet Building on Madison between Seventy-sixth and Seventy-seventh streets, has high ceilings and an oversized skylight. Coming off the elevator, a gallery-goer can feel transported to heaven. I hope that someday Gagosian will hang something of beauty up there: to my eyes, Jasper Johns’s Maps and Andy Warhol’s Shadow paintings don’t do the trick. But the