Jewish Dealer Kenny Schachter on the Art World

In the latest issue of the New Yorker Magazine, Nick Paumgarten questions why are so many people paying so much money for art? In the article, Kenny Schachter, a Jewish London-based private art dealer/curator from London who is a son-in-law of the late commodities trader Marc Rich, is quoted several times with his opinion on the art world.

“There’s a chemical reaction when you buy something—it’s intoxicating,” Kenny Schachter, a private dealer and curator who lives in London, told me. “I bought a painting at 1 A.M. the other night on the elevator in my hotel.”

 

Art, like love, can’t always be had just for money. This was a question of status, or the perception of it. The affront, and the yearning, can get the blood boiling. As Kenny Schachter, the London dealer, told me, “When people want an artist, they’ll kill for it.” Or they’ll sue.

 

Tilton had been one of Zwirner’s first buyers when he opened on Greene Street. After the lawsuit, they continued to do business together, even with work by Dumas. “The art world is too small to exclude enemies,” Schachter said. “You get stabbed in the front, not the back, and then you go to dinner.”