“I came as close as I ever have to actually jacking it in,” he says. “I kind of hid in my garage and wound my exhibition programme down But I’ve put 20 years of my life into this. I mean, the Hoxton Square thing is the biggest commitment I’ve ever made, but I think it’s easier to sell a flat than a painting A painting’s so intangible With a flat, you get square footage. I’m a sort of major-minor player now.”If he hopes his article about the rebuff will bring him endorsement from the British art establishment, he might be disappointed. “I read Kenny’s piece about being ‘bounced’ from the fairs,” says Matthew Slotover, the editor of Frieze magazine and director of the Frieze Art Fair, Britain’s biggest and one of the ones that turned him down “I thought it was great fun. “We’ve reached a point where people buy art simply to put in storage and base their hedge-funds on.

Art isn’t a branch of the stock market, it’s something you live with and learn from. There’s something fucked-up and retarded about buying art you never see.”Recently, Schachter’s contrarian instincts have led him to seek out and collect figures overlooked by what he calls “the fickle fashion-youth-oriented art merry-go-round”. People like late the 1960s American artist Paul Thek, who made some disturbingly realistic sculptures of raw meat, and the Austrian-American architect Frederick Kiesler, who also painted, designed lamps, and wrote books on the philosophy of the store-front.But being shut out of the art fairs last year brought on a crisis of confidence that he confesses was hard to bluster his way out of. “That sounds rather masturbatory, doesn’t it?”To Schachter, the best art and the most unassimilable artists still inhabit the realm of the sublime, but he finds the market more rapacious and corrupting than ever “It’s worse than the 1980s,” he beams.

The more money I have, the more my projects increase in scope I’m always running to catch up with myself.” He smirks. In the past couple of years, his turnover has increased “about two thousand per cent”, and he isn’t at all ambivalent about the money that’s brought in. “I’m one of the most materialistic people you’ll ever meet,” he says, “but I’d throw it all in the bin to go after some foolhardy idea. “I know I said I never would, because galleries were so numbingly dreadful and uniform,” he shrugs; “but then I thought, why not reinvigorate the concept? To me, inconsistency is logical.” He’s also become a secondary dealer, instead of collecting the younger artists he once sought out. Plus, we’re less inclined to box people in and we actively embrace eccentricity.”Since arriving in London, Schachter has opened a permanent gallery. There are only a few people who go to galleries or openings, whereas here the art world is mainstream: the latest Damien Hirst creation will feature on the front page of the tabloids.