In 1974, art dealer Tony Shafrazi spray-painted Picasso's Guernica, which hung in the Museum of Modern Art, with the words "KILL LIES ALL" (probably a typo in the heat of the moment). It is believed that Shafrazi was protesting something or other and as a result, America lost the painting to Spain. In 2006 a man tripped over his shoelace at Cambridge's Fitzwilliam Museum in the U.K. and proceededto fall down a staircase, colliding with three 300-year-old Chinese vases and shattering them. In January of 2010 Pablo Picasso's Rose period painting The Actor was damaged when a woman fell off her heels at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York creating a six-inch gash. In January 2012, a Denver woman, drunk, dragged her naked bottom against a Clyfford Still painting worth $30 million, punched it, slid down against it and with a final flourish, urinated on herself. On Febuary 25, 2012, a far less sinister 15 year-old inadvertently knocked over a Tracey Emin multiple at my kid’s curated show and it didn’t get damaged, but made it into 2 major newspaper and a BBC radio talk show.

The talk of the town is how could I have let a hoard of wild children run loose at a gallery filled with art and permit this mishap to occur, which only happened in the last minutes of a 5-hour opening. Did someone forget about the slaughtering going on in Syria or Iran’s imminent deployment of nuclear weapons? I guess teens coming together and presenting an art exhibit with their peers side by side with professional artists doesn’t make for much news—and you wonder why the model of being famous for being an asshole is so widely embraced the world over. Here is a perfect example of negative reinforcement that when something lousy happens (with no mal intent), you are plastered all over the press and celebrated.

On the BBC they described the show as practically an all night rave—there were rather 3 small, innocuous bands made up of kids and an adult group, all civilized to a fault. I was asked if this incident would put off more parents and children from undertaking similar activities to this, as if there are 1000 like-minded families gearing up to co-curate contemporary art exhibits. Then I was questioned how my kids would make the money for restitution to cover damage, to which I replied they could begin by selling some of the paintings in the show. I am sorry but my kids and their friends took a big risk displaying the art made with much passion in such a context, and it was a great outcome and experience working with them all towards this goal. If not for the gallery and their art endeavors what else is there to do in London? Go to the mall, or worse (if there is something as bad as Westfield).

I even had to defend myself at last night’s Teacher – Parents’ Meetings, discussing more this negligible art affair then the performance of my children at school. Maybe that wasn’t a bad thing. What this has taught me is only to tone it down on fb as the newspapers swooped onto my page and printed some less than flattering comments I made about the situation—not the most pleasant reality test. And I understand the artist is not amused by the publicity, which reminds me of a now seemingly prophetic photo I made in 2006. Finally that this episode should not go totally to waste, some enterprising chap sent me the following email. Out of every mishap comes some way forward…for someone to figure out how to make a buck off it.

Dear Mr Schachter,

I hope you don’t mind the direct approach, only after reading in the Evening Standard about an incident at your gallery, albeit accidental, I wondered if you would be reviewing your security staff supplier?

I am the Director of Celebrity Protection Ltd (CPL), based in London we specialise in providing security services to the Entertainment and Arts Industries. With many years’ experience and customer satisfaction we believe we offer a service second to none. I have attached our company brochure which includes client references should the above be of interest, please don’t hesitate to contact us if you wish to discuss further.

Many thanks for your time.

Kind regards,

Paul Dallanegra
CPL Security Ltd
Tel: 020 7561 0101

image: the fear

dark, wet uk winter.

I was just unceremoniously informed my text could not be sent due to the fact it was a “semantically incorrect message”: evidence of the strong, paternalistic arm of Blackberry censors. And my bad grammar. Admittedly, I incessantly anticipate the blinking red light of incoming messages. What is normally a 20-minute school run took 1:34 minutes in traffic today. No wonder I have gained and lost 10 lbs in both January and February, and seen the bottom of a glass with too much frequency of late. Must be the long, dark, wet, cold UK winter again.

Art and Alcohol from London

I heard on the radio this morning that 200,000 will die in England from cheap alcohol; does that mean freely available or poor quality? Or both. Then I arrived at Heathrow at 7am and they were handing out samples of Baileys and it all became clear.


According to Kelly Crow in today’s Wall Street Journal (the 21st Century art mag), $375m of Richter’s have been sold since 2005 at auction. After recent London results of $11.5m and $5.1m for abstract paintings both small and large that went to China and Russia respectively, at the risk of exposing myself to (further) scrutiny and potential ostracism...I still think they are cheap.

"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.