The world is full of people impelled by wealth to buy, but the grossness of whose taste prevents them from appreciating. These people are the prey of charlatans. The successes which these charlatans achieve choke the reputation of the talented painter. Fortunate indeed is that man of talent if he do not become envious and resentful! One should make up one’s mind to work either for the gross public or for the happy few. One cannot please both at the same time.
—Stendhal, A Roman Journal, 1829

Trends. The Mary Boone Gallery arrived in SoHo a decade ago, along with Neo-Expressionism and a new bullish art market. Boone’s artists, especially the two who would become most famous, Julian Schnabel and David Salle, had no inhibitions—about size, about subject matter, or about taking up a Macho Man pose that had gone out of fashion in the egalitarian atmosphere of the Sixties and Seventies. As a matter of fact, Mary Boone seemed to be almost proud that she didn’t show any women artists; she obviously enjoyed bringing back, single-handedly, the image of the artist as a bad boy who’d been given permission to be bad forever. Schnabel, her baddest boy, resented media claims that he was Boone’s creation, and left a few years ago for the Pace Gallery, where his work has become either lazier or more subdued—one can’t ever be quite sure. A new rabble-rousing recruit, Eric Fischl, was brought in; but the temperature at