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approve, but what is it they say about beggars’ freedom of choice?) and rich individuals, a Scandinavian sovereign fund’s U.S. arts-exchange offshoot, and—finally—Mankoff/STST, my only “true” Wall Street client. My work consists of vetting and authenticating proposals and pitches and negotiating the “buyers’ side” of the projects. I work with my clients’ financial advisers to make sure the funding fits their portfolio standards and that everyone has a clear understanding of their commitment. I try to avoid client conflicts. I’m famously closemouthed; in my business, you hear things, and my policy is to let it be someone else who spills the secrets of the pillow or the family dining table. I also take on the occasional pro bono job where I feel I owe a favor, or it will be especially good for my image.
    It’s not all blue skies and robin redbreast, though. The trouble with my work is that you have to be where the money is, and right now we’re going through an era where the
really
big money every museum and educational institution is chasing after belongs to a pretty sorry bunch of people: Arabs, Russians, twenty-year-old tech geniuses who were too busy coding to learn which fork to use, let alone what Socrates or Beethoven have meant to the world, or that it’s gauche to light a cigar with a 500-euro note, as I heard some Russians were doing a few years back in Saint-Tropez.
    I occupy space at a sweetheart annual rent in a small office building on 63rd Street between Lexington and Third Avenues that came with an STST acquisition before Mankoff got there, and that the firm has never gotten around to using for its own purposes. The exception is a suite of grace-and-favor offices down the hall on my floor that STST makes available to a few retired partners.I’ve nicknamed this space “San Calisto” after the sixteenth-century palazzo in Rome where the Vatican houses its elderly cardinals. About this, more anon.
    Although STST is technically my client, I work almost exclusively with Mankoff. I’m grateful for this, because it protects me from the perception that I’m readily available to advance the social aspirations of the wives of certain higher-ups and their clients, such as prestigious trustee boards, superior
placement
at a particularly desirable gala, even restaurant reservations. I know, for example, that Ludmilla Rosenweis, wife of Mankoff’s #2, Rich Rosenweis, is pushing her husband hard to take a bigger role in the firm’s arts benefactions, a role she clearly believes she can slipstream into a more prominent position in Manhattan society.
    My work with STST can be varied. It isn’t all program underwriting and endowments. Right now, for instance, Mankoff has sought my advice concerning the artist to be commissioned to do a huge painting for the lobby of the STST Global Headquarters building that they’ll be moving into next year. Like its predecessors, the lobby murals at places like LaGuardia Airport and Rockefeller Center, it’s supposed to reflect wealth, technology, power, energy, soaring modernity—the blessings of capitalism. STST’s own Sistine Chapel ceiling, you might say. To my mind, the ideal artist to fulfill this commission in terms of sheer visual excitement would have been Jackson Pollock, and I’d have loved to see what Basquiat would have done with that space, but they’re both dead. The competition is hot and heavy-handed, and the jury’s still out. At least three of Manhattan’s most prestigious art galleries—I’m not naming names, but if you know the art scene, you can make an educated guess—have offered me under-the-table bribes to swing the job to one of their house artists. They seemed surprised and chagrined to learn that I’m not in the “pay to play” business, as many in my line of work are.
    While I would never say as much to Mankoff, I have to admit to a certain discomfort at the subsidy of nearly a half-billion dollars that Mankoff and Rich