Kenny Schachter Gets Emotional Support at LA’s Art Fairs—and Picks Up Some Intel on Larry Gagosian’s Bedroom Dealings

Los Angeles is its own spiritual, quartz-laden universe, and it
takes a little getting used to for a consummate East Coast outsider
like my all-but-LA-illiterate self. Take, for instance, the local
habit of keeping pigs as pets and walking them like dogs. Doing a
little research, I found a helpful primer in “Is a Pig Right for
You?“ on the online Pig Placement Network, which
revealed that the animals are “stubborn, demanding, and
manipulative and can become easily bored, grumpy, depressed,
sedentary, and even destructive and aggressive, if not given
adequate attention by a loving caregiver.” Sounds like most
artists, dealers, and spec-u-lectors I know. And me.

I thought of renting one as an emotional support animal to
accompany me throughout the second iteration of Frieze Los Angeles
and the Felix Art Fair, where I was an exhibitor as
well. A porcine companion certainly would have come
in handy, and perhaps even helped raise my kundalini, which my
locally sourced assistant kindly alerted me was the latent female
energy coiled at the base of my spine. But before I share more
about my newly enlightened, self-aware self, here’s some LA lowdown
I picked up on my travels.

Firstly, before I settled on the talented Lucrecia Roa as my
Felix art-fair boothsitter, salesperson, and spiritual guide (she
came to work with curative crystals in hand), it was suggested that
I get in touch with Hilde Lynn Helphenstein about being my
right-hand woman at the fair. Upon initial email contact to explore
a partnership, she responded:

Let’s make a deal. 

I am the director of Steve Hash’s studio. If we curate one
of his smaller ghost figures in your room (30″ tall) (***HIS WORK
IS FUCKING BRILLIANT) and you pay me $500 a day for my time, I’ll
help you sell your entire booth and I won’t take a
commission. 

Sound do-able for you? 

Um, not really, I don’t roll like that, even though Steve—who is
married to Tommy Hilfiger’s daughter Ally and whose repetitive
concrete ghost sculptures ultimately found a home at SPRING/BREAK
Art Show Los Angeles, an ancillary ancillary fair—was blameless.
Hilde, it turns out, is behind
the Instagram meme account Jerry Gogosian, which she initially
denied before later admitting it and admonishing me that it was
“wack” to disclose her identity and that her memes were “part of a
body of work.” What kind of work is that? Not quite the level of a
reveal as the Daily Mail’s uncovering of Banksy as
Robin Gunningham, a privately educated middle-class Bristol
schoolboy, but amusing none the less. Like Banksy, Hilde was also
exposed prior to my writing—by an Insta account called
@itstimetostopnow—but, as in the case of Santa, I guess people
simply like to keep suspending disbelief, even jaded
art-worlders.

A few odds and ends: Galerie Gmurzynska was involved in the sale
of an artwork by Sophie Taeuber-Arp (Jean Arp’s widow) that turned
out to less than meets the eye. Gmurzynska initially sold it to a
collector with an attribution that proved incorrect; when that fact
became evident, the gallery changed the provenance to another one…
which also proved erroneous. Finally, it became clear that the work
was a “posthumous recreation” of the original, to use the gallery’s
own words. Nonetheless, Gmurzynska refused to refund the proceeds
of the initial sale—and, though an attempt at initiating a criminal
action was brought by the intermediary sellers, they are not about
to relent. The gallery claims no wrongdoing. Stay tuned.

On another front, James Crump, director of the Mapplethorpe
doc Black White + Gray, has finished another
upcoming documentary on the artist Jordan Wolfson,
entitled Spit Earth: Who Is Jordan Wolfson? and
produced by Ronnie Sassoon. Though Jordan signed off on the
project before filming began and fully participated in its
making—to the extent that his parents and ex-girlfriend have major
roles—he has since repudiated the searing psychological portrait
that resulted. I find it odd that he would do so at this late stage
of the film, which is presently in post-production, and which also
prominently features his aunt, the infamous Fear of
Flying author Erica Jong, who discusses subjects as
wide-ranging as Jordan’s penis. I saw a final cut and absolutely
loved it. Trust me, you will too—and not just because I figure
prominently in it as well.

Before I briefly touch upon the LA fairs themselves—about which
more than enough has been said
already—let me note that George Condo’s longtime lawyer, none
other than my dear friend Richard
Golub, has been replaced by entertainment lawyer John Eastman,
Linda McCartney’s brother and Paul’s lawyer. This occurred prior to
Condo being vacuumed up (like
just about every other artist on earth) by Hauser & Wirth. Also, in
the increasingly brutally competitive art world, the mad chase to
steal Christopher Wool from his age-old but not entirely effectual
gallery Luhring Augustine, was thwarted when David Zwirner had
an ill-starred studio visit with Wool that floundered—the two just
didn’t gel, apparently, and the meeting went nowhere.

In the same vein, the most successful art advisor on earth,
Sandy Heller, lost out to Tobias Meyer when it comes to reeling in
the richest whale on earth, Jeff Bezos, who could out and out buy
the entire art market in any given year. (Or so I was told by the
owner of one of New York’s largest galleries, who would know.)
Lastly, there’s the dealer who, in a failed effort to gain
admittance to Art Basel in Basel, bought an artwork from every
gallery on the selection committee and still came up with yet
another rejection letter.

Ok, onto the fairs. While I was awaiting the arrival of my Uber
in front of the Beverly Hills Hotel one morning, two dealers and an
art advisor insisted on cramming into my car when it arrived before
theirs did—and the pushy advisor even went so far as to attempt to
divert the trip to Frieze, even though I was headed to the opening
of Felix. Sorry, no. Then, after I reached my destination, none of
them bothered to thank me for the free ride when I excited—so I
cancelled before they could reroute. Jeez. Manners must be learned
from an early age.

Frieze LA is art-fair lite—perfect for the flighty LA
mindset—and though the city is represented by a smattering of local
galleries, the fair is a snooze of obvious artworks by obvious
people. The smaller scale is not a bad model for fairs the world
over—most of them could use a good pruning. But some things never
change, and at Frieze LA, as with any other fair, a gallery’s booth
was like a self-portrait of its dealer, representing the
proprietor’s personality. This was most evident in the presentation
of small painted rock sculptures at Galerie Eva Presenhuber (of
Zürich and New York), which roped off the entire entrance to its
space, barring access altogether. The booth, it turned out, was a
no-go zone unless you waived checkbook in hand—a perfect analogy
for the art world at large.

PS: if fair stalwart Leonardo DiCaprio didn’t walk around like
ET with a hoodie pulled over his lowered baseball cap, no one would
recognize him. He was pictured in Artnet in a state of deep
contemplation in front of an Avery Singer painting at Hauser’s
stand, probably contemplating how best to flip the work before the
transfer cleared—which wouldn’t be hard, since the art world is as
celeb-obsessed as the rest of the world. He sells more art than I
do.

Like the city itself, Felix is a more rambling affair spread out
over three floors with more discoveries to be made due to the
presence of lesser-known galleries and artists. At first blush, I
thought “never again” due to the stress and pressure to produce
sales after shipping, installation, an assistant, and hotel
expenses are calculated in, but my attitude changed fast after I
made a whopping 23 sales. With my keen commercial instincts, I was
the only exhibitor to go through the effort of shipping 45 works by
11 artists from six different countries—but still I somehow managed
to come out ahead.

Mainly the fair was an opportunity to collect works for myself
that I was interested in at half price (there was a 50 percent
dealer discount). It’s a truism, passed down from Ernst Beyeler,
that you make money by selling art but generate wealth by keeping
it—a note to the flippers out there, who seem to be increasingly
populous in the art world today. Though for the most part there
were none of the bottlenecking issues that convinced busloads of
visitors to turn on their heels last year rather than brave
45-minute elevator lines, there was still some minor traffic jams
involved in getting to the higher floors, which repelled at least
one pharmaceutical heiress over the weekend. Oh well.

What I especially appreciated about my assistant Lucrecia was
the cheerful and spritely salutations with which she greeted just
about every visitor to the room. She kept a resolute smile in the
face of a barrage of inane replies to her hospitality such as, “You
sure do have a lot of art in the room” or “Is this the work of one
artist?” and “Smells like fresh paint!” When you hear these
comments hundreds of times in a day, it begins to weigh on you. I
could only muster the reply that the paint odor was emanating from
my new cologne. I quickly came to the realization that I was not as
much of a people person as I had previously thought—I was
definitely still as bad a salesperson as I ever was, however.

The upside of sitting in an open-to-the-pubic hotel room,
exposed like a hood ornament on a car, is that you can glean
certain crucial bits of information floating around, such as the
dealer who stated she dated Larry G. in the 1980s, and that he
voraciously read up on art day and night, with an unrelenting
hunger to learn more. Of course, being the child that I am at
heart, I couldn’t help but retort, um…how was he in bed? “As
good as he deals” came the reply. Hmm. She also recounted working
for Doug Christmas and having a gun pointed at her head by FBI
agents in search of the notorious dealer, and an occasion when
Richard Serra rammed a knife into her desk seeking payment of
overdue funds.

Art fairs are not without concomitant health hazards: I suffered
a hyperextension of my finger where the extensor tendon got
literally pulled off the bone while I was unpacking and installing,
requiring a splint for eight weeks. I set back my tear-repair in
order to type this column, against doctor’s orders. Ah, the
sacrifices I make. For better and worse, I’ll have more to say
about next week’s ADAA Art Show and the Armory, as I will be
spectating rather than participating, which saps all your mental
energy with or without the application of healing crystals. As
an unapologetic art junkie, I’ll admit that LA feels better and
better as a prime destination to discover great gallery shows,
fairs, and artists. I’ll definitely be back at Felix, if they’ll
have me.

The post Kenny Schachter Gets Emotional Support at LA’s Art
Fairs—and Picks Up Some Intel on Larry Gagosian’s Bedroom
Dealings appeared first on artnet News.