Bono and Sting enjoy a special relationship with Kenny Schachter

"I'm an alien - an illegal alien." Sting's warbling cut across Bono's thoughts about territories. They had been reminiscing about their early attempts to crack America and their conversation had turned to how one would really know you had made it there:

"is it when the books featuring the characters you crowbar into your lyrics get put on the English Lit. reading lists in the colleges with good alternative radio?" burbled Sting, whose shaking and coughing since the winter tour had seen him come to resemble the old man in that famous book by Nabakov.

"It's about units," declaimed Bono. "Sheer shifted units. You play the college towns sure - but you also have to slog your way round the mid west and play every bar and enormodome forty times, with the same basic recipe of guitar, bass, drums and righteous rock served up in exactly measured doses. A real slap in the face for an audience, dished out repeatedly, till they buy up your back catalogue and give you an all too real picture of progress."

"So it's an exact science then?" said Sting, casting his eyes over the latest figures.

HOW MUCH? In this, his first UK solo show, New York based Kenny Schachter will be bringing us news of some of our favourite young British artists and their fluctuating fortunes abroad. A series of 13 graphs will chart the sale at auction fortunes of some of the most prominent yBa's - showing when and how much they have been selling for and plotting the trend for their work as the faltering economy slides towards recession (and the anticipated backlash for art prices). Often grouped together as a 'movement', the artists represented here (from Tracey Emin to Jake and Dinos Chapman; Damien Hirst to Georgina Starr) actually have little in common beyond their entrepreneurial-style invention as such for the market. In this show, Schachter unpicks the hype and presents the figures as a series of economic portraits in garish colours (you need to make an impact with your presentations).

For over ten years Schachter has been making, curating and presenting work at a prodigious rate - often in empty shops and warehouses in SoHo and latterly Chelsea. He has watched and recorded the capricious fashions and neurotic jostling for position that are the hallmark of the artworld and whilst several of the artists he has supported have gone on to mainstream success, he has continually adopted a position of both reluctant and resourceful outsider. In many ways the style and energy of the shows he has presented has paralleled that of some of the artists who are the focus for his work here, so there is a subsequent ambivalence to his work. On the one hand he is an absolutely sincere fan and on the other he's a default critical outsider who knows all too clearly how things work. We'd like to welcome him to Manchester.

Kenny Schachter's work has appeared in numerous group shows nationally and internationally and in solo shows in Miami and Sandra Gering Gallery, New York. He is well known in New York for the numerous shows he has curated and organised over the past decade (over 60 artists appeared in his tenth anniversary show in Chelsea in Autumn 2000) and he has received extensive coverage for his work there - including a front page story in the New York Times Magazine. He has also lectured extensively and recently addressed the 'Curating in the 21st Century' conference at the New Art Gallery in Walsall (published in the eponymous book isbn no. 0 946652 57 0).

Bono and Sting are Graham Parker and David Mackintosh. Amongst other venues, their work together has been shown at Albrecht Durer Kunstverein, Nurnberg; A22, London; Institute of Contemporay Arts, London; Turnpike Gallery Leigh. Mackintosh is represented by Mobile Home Gallery and is currently showing in "Record collection at VTO Gallery, London and playing at Grassy Knoll Productions, Belfast with his band Die Kunst on 5th May. Parker will be showing in "Pete and Repeat" at D.U.M.B.O Arts Center New York from 23rd June, and in solo shows at the Centre for the Understanding of the Built Environment, Manchester and Project Arts Centre, Dublin in July and October this year. Bono and Sting enjoy a special relationship with Kenny Schachter is their 21st project as Bono and Sting.