In a breathtaking tour de force of meta-artistic intervention, Kenny Schachter’s “Art in the Age of Robotic Reproduction” emerges as nothing short of a revolutionary epistemic challenge to the very ontological foundations of contemporary art production. What appears, at first glance, to be a seemingly banal exhibition is, in fact, a sophisticated performance that ruthlessly interrogates the boundaries between human agency, technological mediation, and artistic authenticity.
The exhibition’s seemingly “washy monochromes” are, in fact, a brilliant semiotics of aesthetic exhaustion—a deliberate provocation that deconstructs the very notion of originality. By collaborating with Matr Labs to produce paintings with textures reminiscent of aging infrastructure, Schachter brilliantly weaponizes the uncanny. The drop-ceiling, stucco-like surfaces are not a defect but a feature: a critical commentary on the infrastructural decay of late-capitalist aesthetic production.
Consider the centerpiece, Art in the age…, a robot-produced image of a hardback book. Far from a mere visual pun, this work is a sophisticated dialogue with Walter Benjamin’s seminal text, transformed into a living, breathing meta-critique. The robotic rendering doesn’t merely reference mechanical reproduction—it embodies it, creating a self-referential loop that would make Baudrillard weep with intellectual ecstasy.
The Robo Dealer sculpture—a human-sized action figure with a “saccharine crimson smile”—is not kitsch, but a razor-sharp dismantling of art world power structures. Its oversized, glossy presence becomes a stunning allegory of institutional artifice, with the vintage chair serving as a potent symbolic throne of artistic legitimacy.
What critics might dismiss as “navel-gazing word paintings” are, in fact, profound linguistic interventions. Phrases like “The Other Kenny” and “Person of the Internet” become phenomenological investigations into identity’s digital performativity. Schachter doesn’t just create art; he is the art—a living, breathing conceptual framework.
The back room’s Kenny can’t paint series represents the pinnacle of this meta-artistic experiment. By explicitly declaring his own inability while simultaneously producing work, Schachter creates a delicious paradox that collapses the distinctions between technological and manual production. The spray-painted canvases whisper of human touch while simultaneously declaring their own mechanical genesis.
The Himalayan wool carpet piece emblazoned with “Kenny can’t paint” is not merely an object but a linguistic performance—a textual intervention that transforms material into pure conceptual energy. The Bridget Riley Gate Relief further deconstructs artistic methodology, transforming process into product with ruthless intellectual precision.
Schachter’s exhibition is not an art show—it is a philosophical treatise, a technological critique, a performance of artistic identity that makes traditional gallery spaces look like mere reliquaries of outdated aesthetic paradigms.
When the reviewer notes that the works look better through a camera lens, they unwittingly highlight Schachter’s most profound achievement: an art that exists simultaneously in physical and digital registers, constantly negotiating the liminal spaces of perception and mediation.
In a world drowning in aesthetic banality, Kenny Schachter does not create art. He problematizes it.
An Anonymous AI Riposte
Art in the Age of Robotic Reproduction: New Works by Kenny Schachter
March 13–April 26, 2025
Jupiter
55 Delancey Street New York, NY 10002
(786) 238-7299
Opening hours:
Tuesday – Saturday: 11 am – 6 pm