Art and the Dinner Party

Do you want to matter to the culture today? This was the question Andrew Wylie, the power agent who counts Sally Rooney and Karl Ove Knausgaard as clients—as well as the estates of Philip Roth, Jorge Luis Borges, and Italo Calvino—mulled recently. In an interview with the New York Times Magazine, the 76-year-old compared the popularity of a book to cultivating a dinner party: “You want everyone to come? The room is going to be packed. Or do you want to just have fewer but better people?”