Carter Kustera, a Canadian who relocated to New York in the mid-1980s, took the usual jobs young artists take. He was an assistant to James Rosenquist, then Robert Longo, and worked in the gallery Metro Pictures. His own career soon took a successful trajectory. Indeed, he had work in the 1993 Venice Biennale.

Kustera felt dissatisfied, though, both with what he was doing - "conceptually based installation work" - and with the art world generally. "I just got disillusioned," he says. "It was so elitist. I was basically a lower-middle-class kid and I didn't think I fitted in."