This was the first time Marks had seen the Serra sculpture at its current home. Standing in silhouette against the flat prairie where Wayzata has sprouted, the Serra walls looked a bit lost and forlorn, not unlike the monolith in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. “Look at that,” Marks said. “It’s just . . . on the lawn. It looks smaller when it’s outside, I guess.”

The center of New York’s art world, the modern-day version of what Tom Wolfe once called “the Art Gildo Midway,” used to be up on 57th Street. In the seventies and eighties it migrated to Soho, and for ten years now it has occupied a few square blocks in Chelsea—21st through 26th streets on the block between Tenth and Eleventh avenues. And this western migration happened mainly because Marks had the bright idea of moving his uptown gallery there before anybody else did, and then everybody followed him. Marks’s primary gallery is on 24th Street, but he also has a grand space on 22nd with vaulted ceilings and eight dramatic skylights, and a tiny one-room gallery on 21st.

Along with three other gallerists, Paul Morris, Pat Hearn, and Colin de Land, Marks started the Armory Show, which has become the preeminent art fair in the country. “Basically it’s grown into a big pain in the ass,” he says.

At their townhouse, Marks and Ban- kowsky entertain often—large catered affairs, usually. It is common for Marks’s artists to show up, but he rarely invites collectors; it’s not merely out in the Big Ten states where Marks can be seen keeping collectors at a certain haughty remove. “In all the dinners of theirs that we’ve been to, I can only recall once, after an opening of Terry Winters’s, I believe, that suddenly there were all these awful strangers, who turned out to be collectors,” art historian Robert Rosenblum says. “I just don’t think he has much taste for the sort of person who collects art. Although he’s a great gossip and he’s very good at imitating those silly people and the way they talk, or what silly thing [MoMA president emerita] Aggie Gund was wearing when he last saw her. She’s a terrible dresser, and Matthew and Jack love to talk about it.”

As with all rites of social derision, there could well be a good deal of self-recognition here, for Marks was, in fact, a teenage art collector. He grew up near the Columbia campus and went to St. Bernard’s for elementary school, then to Dalton. His father, Dr. Paul Marks, is a cancer specialist who between 1980 and 1999 was the head of the Sloan-Kettering hospital; his mother is also a doctor and taught genetics at Sarah Lawrence.

“I was one of, I think, three Jewish boys at St. Bernard’s, and the only kid who lived uptown from the school,” he says. “It was on 98th and Fifth, and at the end of every day, the school insisted on having an adult escort me to the crosstown bus stop and wait with me.”

Marks began collecting art when he turned 13. “I didn’t have a bar mitzvah, but as something like a bar mitzvah present, I asked for a painting,” he recalls. “I had a book of American art and I somehow got it in my head that I wanted to own a painting by every artist in it.” Having seen a movie on Channel 13 about Georgia O’Keeffe, he decided to begin with her, and one Saturday his father and he walked to a gallery that sold her work. “It became clear that owning an O’Keeffe painting was not meant to be, but somebody at the gallery said a drawing might be nice,” he says. “Then, that was too expensive. If you turned the page in the book, the next artist was Arthur Dove. I tried to buy a print of his, but there weren’t any. The next page was Marsden Hartley, and a gallery sold his prints, and I picked out a mountain scene that cost $125. I had to beg for it for a while, but it was fantastic. I still have it in my house.”

Through high school, Marks continued to buy and trade for prints. He went to Columbia for two years and worked as a paid apprentice at the Pace Gallery. “I remember him coming to visit me and look at some art when he was a teenager,” says Timothy Baum, a private dealer who specializes in Dada and Surrealism. “I had an obscure, hand-colored print that interested him. I was amazed by his astuteness and his enthusiasm for it. It wasn’t worth much more than a few hundred dollars. He had to pursue me until I’d receive him.”

Even after he transferred to Bennington for the last two years of college, Marks continued to work at Pace during vacations. “Bennington is an odd place, because if you’re interested in literature, you don’t just read it, you have to major in writing,” he says. (Bret Easton Ellis, Donna Tartt, and Jonathan Lethem were among his contemporaries.) “So they wouldn’t just let me study art, I had to be an artist. I painted for two years, and it was useful as far as learning what artists go through, but as soon as I graduated, I packed up my pictures and brought them straight to my parents’ attic, and they’ve never come out since.”

Toward the end of his senior year, he told a member of the art department that he planned to become an art dealer. The instructor, he says, looked him in the eye and told him not to get his hopes up: “He said, ‘They’ll eat you alive.’”

For three years, Marks went to London, where he was employed by Anthony D’Offay, a major dealer of contemporary art. D’Offay is an elegant but odd man with a habit of touching people on the hip to imply confidentiality in conversation—a level of forced intimacy worlds away from Marks’s retiring manner. But D’Offay mentored Marks in building a dealership geared primarily to the needs of artists—and just as important, D’Offay was the person who introduced Marks to Jasper Johns.