Stefan Simchowitz
| Stefan Simchowitz | |
|---|---|
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| Born | October 8, 1970 Johannesburg |
| Occupation | art collector, art curator, advisor |
| Years active | 1995–present |
| Partner(s) | Rosi Riedl |
| Website | Simchowitz |
Stefan Simchowitz (born in Johannesburg, South Africa on October 8, 1970) is the Los Angeles-based art collector, art curator, and art advisor. He is a vocal proponent of social media as a legitimate vector for discovering, distributing, and popularizing the fine arts, primarily using Facebook and Instagram as platforms for self-promotion, discovering new artists, and endorsing those he already manages.
Simchowitz believes that conversations on social media hold a degree of influence over the artworld comparable to other canonical forums for artistic discussion and legitimization, including art reviews written by critics for key publications. Supporters see his method as concerned with diversifying the number of systems which recognize and produce credible artists. A number of them, including, but not limited to Sterling Ruby, Oscar Murillo, Lucien Smith, Petra Cortright, Zachary Armstrong, Kour Pour, Jon Rafman, and Marc Horowitz have all been advised by Stefan Simchowitz. In November 2015, he was ranked #95 in Art Review Magazine's POWER 100, a list of 2015's "most influential people in the contemporary artworld."
Simchowitz is a popular target for critics who claim that his particular penchant for promoting young, undiscovered artists through bulk acquisitions of their work to later flip for profit destabilizes established workings of the art world — age-old, value-determining systems composed of a long-standing and tight network of critics, publications, universities, museums, and galleries that collectively define the nature of good art. He subverts this establishment by selling his curated acquisitions directly to a diverse network of wealthy clientele who trust his taste implicitly.
In the media, he has received both ample praise and heavy criticism. He has been called the Michael Milken of the art world, and "a Sith Lord from the Brotherhood of Darkness," by Jerry Saltz. Art Review's entry on Simchowitz states that "if the artworld needed its Howard Stern, its Ari Gold, its Donald Trump, it got 'Simcho': a brash, publicity-hungry yet highly intelligent collector-adviser-dealer...". Andrew M. Goldstein of Artspace argued that "his approach to collecting and nurturing artists systematically abrogates—annihilates—a whole series of beliefs that lie at the foundation of the art world's critical, institutional, and commercial structures." Simchowitz's trademark transparent and honest attitude leads some to believe that he is simply lifting the veil off of previously hidden activities already prevalent in the artworld. Marc Spiegler, director of Art Basel, attributes Simchowitz's success to the fact that he does exactly what the galleries do, except at a significantly faster clip, and the "he has taken a market that was built on opacity and been much more transparent. He goes to an artist's studio; he puts the stuff on Instagram." Spiegler characterizes Simchowitz's practice as similar in function to galleries of past, in that he holds exclusive access to his collector base. As such, the approach has been characterized as paradigm-shifting in the context of the contemporary artworld, while snuggly fitting into an extended historical lineage of the artworld's many businessmen.
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