On the occasion of his upcoming solo exhibition at The NFT Gallery in New York, we had the pleasure to do an interview with Kenny Schachter. In this video, he talks about his upcoming show, titled Slow Food, NFTs, his career, and the art world in general.
The show at The NFT Gallery (88 Clinton Street) opens 18 May and runs until 17 June, 2023, and we will cover it, of course.
Interview with Kenny Schachter, New York, May 13, 2023.
> Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Exhibition text:
This is Kenny Schachter’s first solo exhibit in NYC in nearly 25 years (he had a mini, tongue-in-cheek retrospective at Joel Mesler’s Rental Gallery in 2018). Things have radically and inexorably transformed in that time, yet also managed to stay the same.
For SLOW FOOD, Schachter will bring together 3 new ongoing projects he is in the midst of working on. Open Book, a participatory digital publication in conjunction with the Async platform, a publication on art and NFTs that never ends; ARTillery: The Game, the basis for a video game in collaboration with Daata Art, pitting characters from the traditional art world versus crypto artists; and, Jabberwock, the first of a sculpture/video series that highlights the absurdity and wrongheadedness of marketing dinosaur skeletons as baubles for the rich in contemporary art auctions.
Schachter first exhibited computer animations and prints in 1993 and hasn’t strayed far from that path since; rather, the technology and tools to create and exchange such works have exploded with the introduction of the blockchain and software advances in relation to art making and marketing. For whatever reasons—the fear of change and/or disturbing the status quo—the resistance to technological innovations in the art world has been fierce and unrelenting.
Schachter, known for his writing (largely for Artnet), lecturing and curating, has been making art for more than 3 decades having recently exhibited at the Kunsthalle in Zurich earlier in the year and in Berlin at Nagel Draxler Gallery. His work is in the collection of Germany’s ZKM museum and will be the subject of a solo exhibition in September 2023 at the Francisco Carolinum Museum in Linz, Austria.
