To be deaf yet determined to sing,
To be lame and blind yet burning for the Great Good Place,
To be radically corrupt yet mournfully attracted
By the Real Distinguished Thing.

W.H. Auden, At the Grave Henry James

Kenny Schachter was the first "professional" person to visit my studio after I arrived in New York straight out of art school ten years ago. I'm not sure why he came except that he was looking at a lot of studios of a lot of young artists and I fit that bill. My work was unresolved and I was a shy and nervous wreck, but Kenny put me in a few shows that he was organizing in Brooklyn and Manhattan. I wasn't in his first show, but I think I was in the second. I still don't know what it was that interested him in the work. But I remember how incredibly exciting it was to be in an exhibition in NEW YORK CITY. It was so great, really great. It was validation. It was what any artist wants: to be taken seriously. My parents still have the invitation from my first group show framed in their living room in Connecticut. I suppose it was the first time in about five years that they perceived me something other than a total fuck-up.

Over these ten years Kenny has organized nearly fifty shows that included 275 artists. Many of these artist, like me, received their first New York exhibition opportunity in one of these sprawling extravaganzas. I suppose Kenny would like me to tell you about the artists he first exhibited who made it really big, but that really is not so important. What is important is that so many young artists, who made work that was often uncommercial and contary to trends, were able to get their work out to the public. Kenny inserted a rare dose of democracy into the system, and I like to think of him as an Andrew Jackson of the art world. Springing forth from his log cabin out on Long Island, equipped with an art education gained somewhere along the L.I.E., Kenny cajoled, bullied, and whined his way into the periphery of the art world (and ultimately onto the cover of the New York Times Magazine). Kenny's spaces were usually raw and cavernous, on the ground floor, and, like some later-day carny, he would wander out onto the street to drag in "the public." The openings, like Jackson's notorious White House bashes, offered plenty of free booze, and there was little doubt in my mind that this was art of the people by the people and for the people.

Years before pluralism became so au courant in curatorial circles, Kenny curated shows that contained a shocking diversity of work: representational painting cheek by jowl with perfomance video, conceptual photos, and kinetic sculpture. It was usually hard to decipher any leitmotif in these shows, but at times the disparate works came together in exciting and unexpected ways. But not always. The rub with democracy is that the trains don't always run on time and, in fact, a number of these shows had more than a passing resemblance to a train wreck. And when the wreck includes your own subtle monochrome painting, into which you poured your heart and soul, and it is hanging in a dark stairwell next to a giant, groaning, polychrome shrub, you long for a little more iron fist. I suppose if I were more of a Jacksonian I would have been enthralled by this messiness, but more than once I left a show muttering about Kenny what John Calhoun said of Jackson: "a worthless scoundrel, a poltroon, and a coward."

But poltroon that he is, Kenny always seems to win me back with his enthusiasm. One lesson that takes about ten years in the art world to learn is that people who stay in this business usually have a genuine commitment to the Real Distinguished Thing. Even the people you think are the most superficial or mercenary. The folks who are only interested in money or glamour or status realize pretty quickly that there are far easier ways to achieve those goals. So the people who stick around either really love art or are pathological, and Kenny, I suppose, is both. He really does go overboard in his enthusiasm for art; it is supremely important to him. I honestly don't know what attracts him and sometimes I am horrified by his choices. But the choices are unexpected and true and sometimes they lead me to think hard about work that I would otherwise pass by. His current perverse obsession with Fairfield Porter is a case in point. What the fuck is that about? I don't know, but the little paintings are pretty great.

Across the street from my studio in Brooklyn is the Glory Social Club, a hang-out for veterans of World War II. I have always felt a certain envy for these men, whose numbers are fewer every year, who had an experience that so powerfully shaped the rest of their lives. But glory, it turns out, is an empty storefront with a blaring tv, or one man playing solitaire and another watching traffic on the street outside. The "greatest generation" argument is ultimately an old man's argument- a curmudgeon's argument. Every generation has it's shining moment. Forty years from now, when Kenny and I have advanced onto the shuffleboard decks at Chelsea Piers, I suspect it will be this last decade that will occupy our small talk between shuffles. And while to be involved in art in New York City during the 1990s is hardly equivalent to invading Normandy, it has, I suppose, defined us just as deeply. And I remain convinced that there are worse ways to piss away a decade than to spend it in pursuit of the Real Distinguished Thing.

--Spencer Finch