ARTS 
Kenny Schachter, a New Yorker, and a dealer in the edgiest contemporary art, who recently opened a space just up the road from the Gagosian Gallery in London's King's Cross, has another project, a £4m development on screamingly hip Hoxton Square. His architect is Iraqi-born Zaha Hadid, who wins prizes but seldom builds buildings. "I kind of think of it as cynical idealism," Schachter says.
Max Protetch, a New York-based dealer, who has for 27 years shown the drawings and models of the world's most esteemed architects - including Hadid - is now helping put together a $30m development in New York's Chinatown. "It's not dissimilar from making a movie," he says. "You buy a property. You develop a deal. You go out and get it financed. You hire a director, the architect, and you are the producer. And if you are lucky, as I am, you have partners you can trust. And you put this thing together." He is working with a rising young architect, Mark Dubois.
From art to real estate to architecture. In a money-saturated, winner-takes-all art economy, the logic has been inexorable. It began when New York artists looking for cheap commodious spaces settled in the manufacturing neighbourhood south of Manhattan in the 1960s and 1970s. Some, like Donald Judd, picked up whole buildings. What happened next is a familiar tale. The galleries moved in, followed by Wall Streeters, looking for duplexes, and bevies of boutiques.
If real estate developers could grow fat by following the art world, the lesson was hardly lost on the art world itself. "Most people ended up making more money from real estate than they ever did from dealing art from day one," Schachter says.
So people were wise before the event when the art world began to leapfrog to New York's Chelsea district, the West 20s, in the early 1990s.
"It was hard to get a building from the beginning," Max Protetch says. And it was only natural that art worlders moving into real estate should steal a march on the pack by deploying a strength - avant-garde architecture.
Kenny Schachter, a maverick, married to Marc Rich's daughter, Ilona, had been impressed by new buildings by the architect Richard Meier in the West Village. "There's been no good buildings in New York in 20 years," he says. "They changed the whole face of the neighbourhood. And they capitalised on the brand-name allure of a high-profile architect to add another element - an unfathomable, ethereal element - of value to a building. They're selling Richard Meier apartments with a little sexy model - a rendition of the building. So they are using the cachet of contemporary art to market apartments."
Schachter was building a new gallery, also in the West Village. Vito Acconci, one of the world's most innovative artists, had let it be known he had retired from art-making and was only interested in undertaking architectural projects. Schachter hired him. He provided the gallery with a door, desk and set of seats made out of a continuous piece of galvanised steel. When Schachter moved to London this was bought by the auctioneer Simone de Pury. And so to Hoxton.
Max Protetch was driven to development by frustration.
"Many of the architects we have showed are two-dimensional," he says. "Meaning that they drew their ideas and wrote about them but were not known as builders. And ultimately that's not satisfying enough. I decided to get involved three dimensionally. I spent a few years with a friend who is chief executive of a real estate bank. About a year ago we paired up with two young developers and formed a company called Tenacious Real Estate." Does he plan more ventures in real estate?
"Oh, sure. I'm having a ball," he says.
After Hoxton, Kenny Schachter had planned to execute a New Yorkish manoeuvre in London, developing a building to include a gallery in a depressed neighbourhood, namely King's Cross. He learned about London's non-art developers the hard way. "I was gazumped," he says. Now he is trying to complete the Hadid building. "We've been working on it almost a year and a half," he says. "I hope to break ground in three to five months." He plans to involved Vito Acconci in the interior spaces too.
anthonyhaden.guest@verizon.net
