"From Long Island to London: A Memoir in 1000 Words" from A Hedonist's Guide to the Art World, edited by Laura Jones

Kenny Schachter has been collecting and curating art forever. The recipient of a Rockefeller supported grant, he has also taught and lectured all over the world. He does get around. He received planning for Zaha Hadid's first commercial building in the UK and has exhibited his own work at various galleries including the Sandra Gering Gallery in NYC and International 3 in Manchester. He is now open to suggestions. 


From Long Island to London: A Memoir in Art in 1000 Words (More or Less) 
By Kenny Schachter

I was born a middle class fat kid in Long Island, nearly catatonic due to a heavy-handed father and the early death of my mother. Cosseted in the suburbs, there was little in the way of cultural titillation other than reading car and sports magazines and collaging the contents onto my very 1970s, very cork walls.

Procrastinating from a law exam, I hesitantly visited the estate sale of Andy Warhol, which opened my eyes to the commercial side of art; prior to that, and because I had never before stepped into a commercial gallery, I naively thought paintings travelled non-stop from the studio to the museum. When I finally did enter the sterile white walls of a gallery, I was spontaneously smitten (and horrified), took an unsecured loan to acquire a Cy Twombly print, and soon began dealing in works on paper like an idiot savant.

Cognizant that there existed a gaping hole in the breadth of my art-historical knowledge, (anyone can become expert in post-war art in six months if they bother to read), I conned my way into a teaching position at the New School for Social Research rather than suffer another course as a student. After taking an adjunct position on probation, I wormed my way into teaching and lecturing - from New York University, Columbia and Rhode Island School of Design, to the Royal College of Art and Manchester University.

Self-taught about the past, I started curating hit and run exhibits of non-affiliated emerging artists, while also showing my own art and writing. Why not? In effect I had become a middle class, Jewish, outsider artist from Long Island.

Some of the people I exhibited prior to their gallery affiliation were Cecily Brown, Fred Tomaselli, Rachel Harrison, Wade Guyton, Andrea Zittel and Janine Antoni. My calling had become known, albeit as a late bloomer, not having entered a gallery until I was 28. In addition to supporting the work of younger artists, I worked with underappreciated and undervalued artists like Vito Acconci and Paul Thek. It has always struck me as odd that so much energy is spent supporting and writing about artists like Emin, Hirst, and Taylor-Wood who already have a massive network of support. So rather than fret too much, I use them (along with the likes of Jay Jopling and other media figures) as grist for my own send-up art pieces.

Though I swore I’d never open a gallery - I was curating but never much liked the process of selling (not the best mindset for a dealer) - I commissioned conceptualist-turned-designer Acconci to create his first built interior. Though the design was meant to be temporary it was comprised of thousands of pounds of steel, so when I determined to move to the UK, I was faced with a dilemma: store the entire gallery in perpetuity or find a way to flog the contents of the space. In the end, I auctioned the gallery including the front door, desks and walls at a design sale at Phillips. It seems there is always a way round a problem.

Being virtually the only collector of the late artist Paul Thek for years, I recently collaborated on an exhibit of his work at the Reina Sofia Museum in Spain and a 500 page text with MIT Press, the only in English prior to upcoming Whitney and LA County Museum exhibits in 2010-11. The art world is finally taking notice 22 years after his death, so better late than never.

Despite a violent mugging at knifepoint while sitting at an exhibit I’d organized entitled I Hate New York in a temporary space in Shoreditch, I moved to the UK in 2004. The move to London might have been instigated by a midlife crisis, but I prefer to tell myself it was a mix of complacency, boredom with the homogeneity of New York, and some desire for adventure that drove me to jump ship.

I bought a site on Hoxton Square with a view to developing it with Zaha Hadid, prior to her winning the Pritzker Prize. Despite being one of the world’s most progressive thinkers and architects, I felt that she was largely ignored in the country she had lived and worked in for 35 years. Since then, I have organised countless exhibits and projects with Zaha from a show at Sonnabend Gallery to commissioning her design of a car. I then achieved planning permission to erect her first building in London to coincide with the 2012 Olympic Swimming Pavilion, although Zaha remains skeptical I can pull it off in this day and age of tightened credit markets. We live in hope.

In today’s fungible world, geography is less a factor in our lives then ever before; all we need are our Apples and Blackberries and we are good to go. But there are some subtle differences between London and New York: under the veil of civility, Brits are a fairly violent lot (football matches often being an excuse for a good brawl); the health care system in the UK (largely due to a distinct lack of hygiene) is more than a bit primitive, and the complexity of getting around town is mind boggling. I need a Sat Nav just to get to the newsagents at the end of my street; as for going to a handful of galleries, well that can take days.

But since moving, I have not missed New York for a day, though some things are hard to shake, namely my Long Island accent, which my kids will surely never let me forget.

I have participated in and been thrown out of art fairs due to both my outspokenness and my flouting of the capricious fair rules. I once facilitated an intervention by Vito Acconci in the Basel art fair that was deemed to cut off the circulation down the aisles. They threw me out. I then filled a booth at the Armory Show in New York with secondary market offerings. The Armory specifically precludes such material (or used to anyway). Again, I was thrown out.

As for the Frieze art fair in London, they never invited me to visit, never mind to have a stand. I suppose the series of articles I wrote highlighting the pretentiousness of the proprietors didn’t help much. The closest I got to joining was when I intercepted a VIP invite that was meant for a former inhabitant of my house, that I happen to know well. But let’s move on.

Despite the hiccoughs, I am still at it. By no foresight on my part, art became bigger than the big business that I initially ran away from. I went from dealing in the art of the young unknowns - a lot like selling t-shirts in a market stall – to dealing in Monet, Van Gogh and Picasso. A shift I could never have dreamed of in the beginning. Working with artists, I have nearly been stabbed to death, been shot at with a gun loaded with blanks (at the time I didn’t know if the fluid on my lap was blood, urine or Margarita - thankfully it was the latter) - and repeatedly had my life threatened by disgruntled emerging artists. Hence my appreciation of artists no longer breathing: they’re much easier to deal with than the ones that still have a detectable pulse.