‘I’m a shopkeeper,’ the gallerist told critic Roberta Smith in an interview with Numéro, but he hit out at critics who claim an empire of 18 exhibition spaces worldwide meant a love of art didn’t drive him. ‘Why would I put myself through it? There are far easier ways to make money.’ With succession plans murky, the eighty-year-old Gagosian says he doesn’t micromanage, but there’s not an artist among the 100-plus represented whose work he doesn’t know well. Among the newer faces is an old one: Jeff Koons returned to the gallery after jumping ship to Pace four years ago. The programme was also heavy on gallery stalwarts: Cy Twombly and Picasso at the 980 Madison Avenue flagship, Willem de Kooning at West 24th Street, Brice Marden in Paris, Richard Avedon in Rome. The London gallery staged a show of Beatle Paul McCartney’s photographs, but the oldest face was reserved for Art Basel Paris, where Gagosian broke the contemporary art fair’s rules by hanging a seventeenth-century Rubens. On top of his usual activities, he also bought himself a bookshop – the storied indie Book Hampton, in fashionable East Hampton.