Kenny Schachter Says Stop Complaining About Art and Do More

'State of Art' is a new HypeArt series inviting artists, curators, collectors and other leading voices to weigh in on the ideas, debates and cultural shifts shaping contemporary art. Through intimate questions and personal recommendations, the series offers a closer look at what is exciting the art world, what needs to change and where things may be heading next.

Kenny Schachter has never been easy to categorize, which is largely the point. Artist, writer, curator, lecturer and collector, he has spent more than three decades making work while chronicling, criticizing and occasionally antagonizing the art world around him. His writing has become particularly known for turning insider access into sharp, often self-deprecating commentary on the personalities, money and absurdities driving the contemporary art market.

For all the noise Schachter makes around the industry, however, his relationship to art itself remains remarkably earnest.Paul Thek is a case in point. Schachter’s fascination with the late American artist stretches back decades, from collecting his work and contributing to Paul Thek: Artist’s Artist to curating exhibitions dedicated to him, most recently alongside Jonathan Anderson at Thomas Dane Gallery in London in 2025.

It’s no surprise, then, that Thek resurfaces throughout Schachter’s answers for our latest State of Art discussion, including a small painting he first encountered in the 1990s and still hasn’t been able to shake. Schachter looks ahead to his own return to the gallery this fall, considers what it takes to keep making when the art world gets gritty and delivers some characteristically succinct advice for anyone spending too much time lamenting its current state: stop complaining and do more.

What’s the one show from the first half of this year that you can’t stop thinking about? Paul Thek at Galerie Buchholz in New York City.

Did any artwork actually make you feel something real this year, or has everything felt a little flat? No art makes me feel flat. It all moves me, to my marrow, whether good, bad or ugly. Or worse.

What did touch me, to the bone, was Paul Thek’s “Bread and Buttocks” (1979–80) at Buchholz, depicting just that: a portion of a male torso and a slice of bread rendered in oil on canvas. The work is small in scale, incorporating a quaint overhanging picture light attached to the antique gold frame and a child’s school chair situated in front to view the diminutive piece. It proves once and for all that size doesn’t matter as much as what you do with it.

I first encountered the painting at Thek’s 1995 retrospective, The Wonderful World That Almost Was, in Rotterdam, and subsequently at the Whitney in 2010. I was touched by the colorful composition, play on words and juxtaposition of shards of abstraction with figuration.

Though Thek referred to this series as purposefully “bad” in relation to what he saw unfolding in NYC at the time, when artists like Julian Schnabel and Francesco Clemente were painting big and bad — not in a good way — and ruled the roost, I think Thek’s response is f-ing masterful.

What’s a show you have marked on your calendar for the rest of the year and why? Not to be (too much of) a pig…but my upcoming show, This Is It, at Alex Berns gallery in New York’s Tribeca in November, where I will present new sculptures, as well as photos and archives from the early 1990s.

“Every year I am alive, cogent and mobile is a great year for art.”

If you had to give the 2026 art world a report card grade right now, what is it and why? Every year I am alive, cogent and mobile is a great year for art. The rest of my life is another story, which you’ll be happy to know I won’t get into now.

What’s one trend in the art scene you want to see go away and one you want to see more of? Stop complaining and do more.

If you could sum up the art world right now in exactly three words, what would they be? Tough. Stay committed. (Or be committed. It might be the easier choice.)

If you could grab a drink or meal with any artist tonight, living or dead, who would it be and what’s the first thing you’re asking them? The obvious answer for me is Paul Thek, as I have been obsessed for more than three decades, including curating exhibitions on the artist at Thomas Dane and Pace galleries and writing about him for MIT Press, among other publications.

The first thing I would ask is: How did you manage to work so prodigiously and profoundly for so long? Primarily because I’m so damn jealous!