I guess I never seriously thought that I would become famous as a painter. And now, after being in New York City for 10 years, and seeing how the art world works, I know for sure that fame will not happen.

The New York art world is a lot like Peyton Place, if you know what I mean. There are a few major players and, in a way, they decide who is hot and which artist they can push on the viewing public. It has a lot to do with money. The bigger the money behind the artist the more famous the artist will become. And by money I mean what gallery is representing the artist and which collector has bought the artist's work. Fame happens to only a handful of people. And there is a huge gap in the art world between the haves and the have-nots. You are either making big bucks or you are just a schlepper of some sort for 12 dollars an hour or less.

For a while, I thought I could teach art. I thought I could be a college professor and have a decent life, with plenty of time do my own work. But after my three years in an MFA program, I believe that the art school system is one big lie. The teachers, for the most part, are third-rate hacks, usually past their prime both as teachers and artists. The chance of a young person getting a job is very slim and I gave up on the idea of teaching a long time ago. Although it is a good way to meet young girls if you are a dirty old man.

So I am an art mover.

I get up around seven in the morning most days, sometimes slightly hungover from lack of sleep or too much beer, and then I get in a truck and drive around for eleven or twelve hours, sometimes more in the busy seasons, carrying big crates of art from the homes of rich people or warehouses to museums or other warehouses. The best is to drive to the Hamptons because it takes all day and you usually only do three stops, and two of those involve a milkshake at the Candy Kitchen in Bridgehampton and then the beach.

But this doesn't happen too often. Usually, we just drive to certain parts of Manhattan. We go to the same places a lot: Sotheby's, Christie's, museums, galleries, and some private dealers. And warehouses. That's something that I bet people don't know: the vast majority of the world's art--including a lot of what you see in books and think of as being really famous--is just boxed up in warehouses. Look at the Museum of Modern Art, only like 5 percent of their collection is shown. The rest is in crates. Sometimes it reminds of the final scene in Citizen Kane.

Every once in a while we go to a corporation that collects art and this is always where you get the most bureaucracy. You have to deal with the doorman, the elevator man, the loading dock guy, and finally you reach the registrar and she will lead you through a maze of office cubicles to some storeroom or president's office to pick-up some Frank Stella or something equally as obnoxious. It is funny, though, how the corporate collection reflects the nature of the particular company.

My fellow art movers are mostly artists. A few are musicians and a few are just normal guys. I like working with other artists. There is a core group of us who have been with our company for at least three years. We talk about art, usually in the negative, like how crappy a show is that we see, or else we gossip about the art world. But actually, lately, we mostly talk about the job and the stupidity of it. None of us have had any major success, although some have had one-person shows and there's a guy I know who shows with a really good gallery in the city. But so what, the market sucks right now. Nobody is buying anything except blue chip, established stuff. I mean, this guy, he's still working on the trucks. As for the rest of us, most of us realize that we will never be able to support ourselves as artists, even though everyone wishes they could.

I have moved all the big name white male artists of this century, and I would say that most of the art that we move, if we art movers see it, we don't like. It all seems very old, very stale. Most artists, once they become successful, just seem to repeat themselves. And speaking for myself as a mover, not as an artist, it pisses me off when I break my back for something that was made with no sense of craft, or is needlessly heavy, or is too big and full of self-importance. I always like art that is small and light, even if it is crappy.

A lot of the time we don't even know what it is we are moving because it's already in a crate when we arrive. But sometimes, very rarely, you see something great. Like you go to Si Newhouse's place on the East Side and see a Lucian Freud painting in the living room, which I thought was really impressive. And then--with the crates--who knows what's in there? I was once escorted by police from the airport to the Metropolitan Museum, so whatever was in those crates must have been worth something to someone.

Of course, basically everything we move is worth a lot of money. All of our private clients--you know, the individual art collectors--are rich. Very, very rich. It's hard to say what the average rich person's collection is like. Usually the more money one has, the better the art, but of course, there are always exceptions. One of the first things I did on this job was to move the entire collection of a rich idiot who made his money in shopping malls. There was a lot of kinetic sculpture, including a giant fake rock made of fiberglass, mounted on a concrete slab in the backyard. If you flipped a switch in the kitchen, the rock moved back and forth on the slab. Talk about stupid. And this rock could have paid my salary for six months. And the rich idiot wore those polyester golf pants with no belt loops. And we found a dildo in his bedroom.

Then there was this guy who had this very large suburban house full of taxidermy animals, like elephant feet and big game heads on the wall. The whole house was filled with them and it was very odd. And what made it even odder was that the house seemed like it hadn't been lived in for the last five years. It was really dusty and dirty. The guy'd moved to Montana, I think. But it didn't matter where he was: we carried all of his dead animals out to our temperature-controlled truck, which took them back to our warehouse, where they are now stored in a climate-controlled room for an indeterminate amount of time.

Sometimes on this job you realize how weird people can be when it comes to art. I once went to pick up an installation piece that consisted of a long wooden table and a canoe. And inside the canoe were dried up pieces of bread that the artist had chewed up and spit out. I think this was supposed to be some sort of Zen activity that was supposed to, you know, comment on consumption in a capitalistic society, or something stupid like that. Anyway, the whole canoe was filled with these hard mouth-sized pieces of bread and when we arrived the collector had these two Japanese teenage girls counting all the pieces. How could it possibly matter if there were 2600 or 2575 pieces of this dried, chewed-up bread? It was so absurd. The final count was like 3263 or something, which I wrote down on the paperwork. I wonder if the people at the museum counted the pieces when it arrived.

The collector of this bread did help us get the table into the too-small elevator, which was very nice. Most people just close the door on you--and that's one of the worst things about this job: art movers are treated like any other service person. Which means that we're treated like crap. For starters, we have to go into buildings though the back entrances. Next time you're on the Upper East Side try going into a doorman building with a package. See what happens. Or try going into Joan Rivers' pad to pick up some jewelry and watch the house maid look at you like you are insane when you ask to use the bathroom. That is the thing about the really rich: you are always dealing with the assistants, the secretaries, the maid, the doorman. They are the ones who will never give you a tip either. Why should they? It's not their Monet you just moved. However, when you do see the rich goofball with the sexy wife or girlfriend, he will probably give you a tip because wants to show off in front of her. Especially if she is new.

And then, after the service entrances, you have to ride in the service elevators. These are some of the scariest places in the world, if you ask me. New York is full of old ones that are operated by cables. And the high rise types are like being inside wind tunnels--try riding in one with too much weight. We had to lift this 1000 pound marble slab into the elevator of the UN apartment building because it was too long to go straight in. It took about six of us to lift it. Then, while it was leaning against the elevator wall and we were underneath it, the car started to drop erratically because of the weight. We got stuck in there for almost an hour; the whole time was spent thinking we were going to die, telling stupid jokes about disaster movies and trying not to shit in our pants. This was done for this bachelor type who had nothing but Hawaiian shirts in his closet. Family money from aluminum, I think.

The service entrances and elevators make you realize that you are part of the lower class and I guess, in that, the architects have succeeded in some perverse way. I mean, you feel like a service person when you are in them--you know where you are and why you're there. It's very humiliating--as is being treated like shit by the owners and the doormen and everyone else--but it makes a certain amount of sense, architecturally. I just wish I could make every architect who designed a small elevator or a dangerous service entrance come on the truck with us for one day, so I could show them what idiots they are. I have a real distaste for architects now. Look at all the ugly buildings in New York City and remember: they are worse on the inside.

It's funny how my view of certain artists--and of the art world in general--has gone down the toilet from doing this job. I guess that I think there are just too many people making art. And most of the art just isn't very interesting. It's depressing. So I am trying find another job right now. I really do not want to work in the art world in any capacity any more because it doesn't pay enough money and because I'm just kind of sick of it.

But, you know, I have a studio at home and whenever I get the chance, I try to work. So I guess I haven't completely lost my interest in art. I don't get much time to do it, maybe once a week or so, and I haven't actually painted in two years, but I have been doing these drawings that are really small. I still do it because I like the activity of making something.

Although, I suppose I could do something else and be a lot more satisfied.

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