Byline: Robyn Perry

Many collectors are the most influential people you’ve never heard of. Not so Stefan Simchowitz, the art collector who has been dubbed the “art world’s patron Satan” (New York Times Magazine), “the greatest art-flipper of them all” and “a Sith Lord from the Brotherhood of Darkness” (Jerry Saltz on New York Magazine’s online blog). Seems like every art magazine or critic has posed the question around Simchowitz—does he or doesn’t he?
Born in South Africa, Simchowitz received a B.A. in Economics from Stanford, attended the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, produced 15 feature films including Requiem for a Dream, and co-founded celebrity photo and video service MediaVast, which Getty Images bought for $200 million, all before becoming an independent consultant/curator/strategic cultural entrepreneur in the art world.
He buys artists early and in bulk, often getting to them first. He values his own collection of about 1500 pieces of emerging contemporary art at around $30 million. He’s been blacklisted by galleries but has found ways to get what he wants anyway.
 I spoke with Stefan Simchowitz by phone from New York. I envisioned him prowling along empty Westside LA streets as we talked, since between his plummy accents he was panting.

Artillery: It seems you left the film industry right around the time LA stopped being just a film company town, and also started being the West Coast art town.
People like to have these absolutes, like it’s binary: it goes from a to b, black to white or blue to green, but I don’t agree. It doesn’t. Its like a floral arrangement; they put the roses in, then the tulips, then the greens; they’re just adding more flowers to the city, and the city’s becoming more vibrant and more colorful, eclectic and diverse, and more powerful in its diversity. I think that’s what’s interesting. The film business is so central to LA and always will be. The film industry has become much more interested in the art industry. The art industry has always been interested in film; they’re just getting closer together. And in proximity, they can begin to learn from each other, they are learning from each other in LA in a way that’s quite unusual, in the respect that the way film content and film culture are distributed and manufactured within the Hollywood system has so many interesting attributes, so much talent and, frankly, decades of experience building the Hollywood system, that is still today the preeminent system for cultural production in the world. The art business can perhaps learn a lot from it and Hollywood, vice versa, can learn a lot from the art production system, in how art deals with ideas, concepts and has a worthy respect for the narrative of ideas and the complexity that ideas bring to society and culture. LA’s like this perfect marriage of these two industries. Of course, the one’s always been dominant, but art is coming to gain its own foothold in the community.

So you brought a lot of experience in distribution and distribution channels to the art world.
I began in the movie business. I’m from South Africa; I went to Stanford undergrad. At Stanford, I watched movies every single day. I had a laser disk player, and I would literally watch a movie to two movies every day. Probably did it for five or six years; I watched hundreds of movies. It was a revelation. I watched Japanese cinema, French New Wave, the noirs, and really systematically, the westerns, the revisionist westerns of the ‘70s, the Eastwood westerns. You build up a huge cinematic language. There’s a dealer in New York named José Ferrer that I have a particular love for because he has such a great knowledge of cinema and film. I really think that the language of cinema has been critical to me in understanding things, and also my experience in building a business as a young producer in Hollywood helped form many of my ideas and strategies, methodologies as to how I function today as a collector, patron, dealer, curator, a sort of hyphenate within the art industry. I have great reverence for what the film business gave me, in its entrepreneurial skills.

So you’re still a producer, in a way.
That would be one way of putting it elegantly.

It sounds like you’ve worked hard to educate your eye, but your dad was a collector, right?
And my mom was an artist. I’ve had a love for photography since I was 15 years old. I’ve taken pictures and I’m very proud of them; you’ll notice them all over my Instagram account. I would have loved to have been a photographer, but I could never find the will to behave in that way, to secure jobs and be that individual. But taking pictures since I was 15 years old, literally almost every day of my life, I see the world through images, crafted through my understanding of film, my understanding of the power of images. The amount of experiences I’ve had throughout my life position me, in a strange way, perfectly for this moment, where social media comes along and gives me an outlet for the specific way in which I communicate, which is through images and the sharing of information that’s intellectually interesting to me. Social media is a perfect way for me to publicly diarize my life, and share things I couldn’t necessarily—you can’t really go to a magazine and say, “Hey, here’s photographs of my kid, do you want to publish them, aren’t they beautiful?” But they’re very interesting to me, and that journey’s interesting to me, and I take great care documenting them. Images are so central to the way that I think and behave.

 

How much sleep do you get? I saw one of your long Facebook posts at 3:45 AM.
I was in Australia, in the Blue Mountains. But the strange thing is, I’ll have an idea that will percolate in my head and I’ll suddenly just want to get it out and I’ll sit down—that was a 3,000-word post—and I’ll write that in 10 to 15 minutes, one sitting. Once I’m in the zone and I’ve thought about things, it just sort of flows out. A lot of these conversations, I miss certain things, clarify certain things—I like the dialogue that ensues because it enables me to think through the ideas. Sometimes people disagree with it or attack it, and I answer them in a way that answers a lot of the holes in my original argument, or even think through things that I haven’t thought through properly, which sometimes helps change my opinion of things. I’ve met a handful of people through social media, who I’ve never met in person, who have been an absolute enlightenment to me, in my thought processes and in witnessing their clarity of thought. One is a guy named Robert Keil.

 

I liked what he said about the combination of your eye and your understanding of economics making you a force to be reckoned with.
Some people have what I call “clarity of vision.” They’re able to distinguish the leaves from the bush, and the bush from the forest of trees. They have clarity, unencumbered by the weight of their own baggage. I enjoy it when these people come into my life, and do so through such a random, open environment as Facebook.

How do you feel about democracy?
I’m a great believer in democracy. I believe in diversity. I believe in the power of different voices coming together; I believe in the conflict that those voices bring against each other, creating balance and imbalance in the system. I think conflict is part and parcel of the condition of human evolution, so I’m a huge believer in democracy and its constant state of flux. That’s a strange question to ask me.

A democratic approach to the art market plus social media—I think you’re saying it equals evolution.
The art business has always been democratized to a degree, and it just becomes a more interesting democracy as the participants become more diverse and there become more participants. I don’t think it was an undemocratic environment before, I just think it was an environment that had fewer players and hence less diversity and so less of an appearance of being democratic by its lack of diversity and its sheer reduced volume. Now there are so many voices that come to it in such great volume that, compared to what it was in the ’50s and ’60s, it’s far more democratic. And the entry point for people to engage in art or have a conversation is completely different to what it’s been. These things have been facilitated by the ability to communicate easily—mobile telephones and social media—and I like it.  

Didn’t that become a sort of illness, especially in New York, where the aperture kept getting smaller and smaller as artists were just focusing on producing for the rich?
And no one cares, so you just have these institutional paradigms. It’s a complex issue because the art world tends to frame things through a very specific moral and ethical lens, tailor-made to suit the structure that the art world has built, specifically in the postwar period. And it’s now really getting challenged at every corner by a much more mobile, flexible system of operating.

What is Simco’s Club, and how is it a new model?
I don’t really believe in new models, I just believe in a more productive way of doing the same thing. I’m not reinventing the wheel: it’s a really simple website—just aggregates my newsfeed from Facebook and Instagram, and people can get a general idea of what I do and what I’m about, see some notable press, and I sometimes send out a funny newsletter/shitlist/hitlist. It’s not really a business, Simco’s Club, it’s just a communication tool. I don’t think many people really go there, it’s just for convenience; most people still experience my shenanigans through my Instagram or Facebook page.

It’s something we’re already accustomed to, matching buyers with content makers, so why the big backlash? It’s like when Dylan went electric. What is this huge bunch of hate mail around your work?
I have no idea. I invest every single penny I make in art, I take risks and invest money and spend money on young artists, and as I get older and more seasoned, I don’t look to collect older artists like Richard Prince—and I don’t mean that in a denigrating way—but as a “graduate,” most people look to collect Warhol or Richard Prince. I don’t. I believe in young art. I believe in Emerging Contemporary as a category. I believe we live in a golden age of art production. There is more funding for art production, education for art production, more collectors for art production than ever before, and I think we’re in a sort of Renaissance of art. As opposed to some conversations I’ve had: “But there’s so many artists; there are thousands. It’s terrible; I’m going to collect more blue-chip work.”

 

I made a joke recently that if I’m a donkey, I’m collecting tails because they’re pinning the tail on the wrong donkey. I think Jerry Saltz had an idea of an archetype of the kind of collector or individual I am. What’s ironic about what Jerry Saltz writes—I relate to Jerry, I think he’s a great writer; I like him, I like his thinking, but without meeting me or coming to see me or interviewing me or talking to me, he kind of pinned the tail on completely the wrong donkey. So everyone else was like, we’re actually the evil speculator that Jerry’s writing about, but guess what? He’s got the wrong guy for the crime, and this guy seems be able to take it pretty well, so we’ll let him collect all the tails for us and we can scurry about doing our business under the pretense of being the good and the great, the decent and the moral, the ethical and the fearless, and Simchowitz can be the whipping boy and take the heat.

What’s the Depart Gallery?
It’s not a gallery, it’s a foundation run by Pierpaolo Barzan, who started it in Italy over 10 years ago. I was a strategic consultant for his foundation for a very long time; he’s a client of mine, a collector, a wonderful guy. He wanted to leave Italy and come live in Los Angeles. We slowly came together and he opened the project space in LA. I am all about supporting art across every category. I think Depart Foundation has this in its mission, and I’ve been very supportive of the foundation in achieving those goals.

Do you buy art you like?
I only buy art I like. I only manage art that I like. I only sell art that I like.

 

What do you like right now in LA?
I’ll tell you something I bought recently that not many people know. I bought a ceramicist, an artist named Jeffry Mitchell, who I think is in his mid-50s. He makes these uniquely heavy, large ceramics. I bought them from a gallery that closed, Ambach and Rice, and I love them. That’s something LA that’s something I like, Jeffry Mitchell.

Something else I like that’s not obvious? We have a lot of good art. Someone else I’ve collected a lot of work from and placed a lot of work for is Jennifer West, who I think is an amazing mid-career artist and totally underrated from a market perspective. She does a tremendous amount of great video work, and she does these amazing filmic prints. She’s someone who I think you would be surprised to find that I like, but I’ve collected her quite heavily.

What does it mean to have an eye, and can you cultivate it, or are you just born with it?
You’re born with it, but if you don’t cultivate it, it will not develop. Art is so pregnant with emotion and taste. I know collectors who have good eyes; I can tell the difference between them and collectors who don’t have eyes. Collectors who have good eyes might have collections I would never collect myself or like, but I know they’ve got a good eye. But you immediately enter the moral hazards of the business and the quagmire that surrounds it when you start discussing these things—because if you meet any collector, one of the first things they’ll tell you to justify their collecting values is: “I buy only what I love, therefore I’m a moral collector.” But often times you can see that what they love is like a stuffed rhinoceros head on their hunting cabin wall or a huge painting of some crazy scene in gaudy colors in red and pink purple—hideous—but they bought it because they loved it, therefore it’s good and they’re collecting under the correct moral procedure, buy what you love.

This discussion of how we choose to frame the art world from a moral perspective is one of the central themes I find really fascinating, and the one macro theme that I’m really interested in challenging, understanding and discussing in the art world. If we can really come up with a system to question these belief systems, we can come up with a much more productive and much more ethical art world that benefits the values of everyone involved, artist collector dealer curator institution, and if we can just attack these problems we could end up with a solution that’s really in the best interest of everyone, what I call intelligent decision-making: decisions that benefit everyone involved.

 

Inge Reist is the director of the Center for the History of Collecting in America at the Frick Art Reference Library of The Frick Collection, New York. She plays additional roles as chief of research collections, which includes the Frick photo archive, and choosing what books to buy for the Frick Library. Reist’s essays on the history of collecting include “Helen Clay Frick, Charting her own Course” in Power Underestimated: American Women Art Collectors (2011). She is also co-editor (with the Getty’s Gail Feigenbaum) of Provenance: An Alternative Art History (2012), about the “social life of art.”  

Since the Center for the History of Collecting was founded in 2007, it has produced 13 symposia about art collecting; the 14th, on collecting photography, will take place this May. The Center runs an archive directory for the history of collecting in America, publishes books and awards book prizes and fellowships for study in this area, and is collaborating with the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art to produce 10 oral and video histories of contemporary collectors who played a formative role in shaping American collecting during the 20th century. “The history of art collection and patronage is in many ways the history of art itself,” Reist has said.  

In her introduction to an onstage interview with collectors Eli and Edythe Broad and Joanne Heyler, founding director of LA’s new Broad Museum, Reist noted that the purpose of the Center for the History of Collecting is “to nurture the study of collectors of art, old and new, and of the patrons, because I don’t think it’s overly dramatic to say that without the patrons and collectors, our institutions would be severely challenged, and without the patrons, who knows how many artists might starve?”

I talked to Inge Reist by phone the same February weekend The New York Times reported that one third of the work from the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. is being absorbed into the National Gallery of Art, a “collection of collections.” Reist had flown out of New York in time to miss another big snow storm, and spoke from the passenger seat of a car hurtling along a freeway to Pasadena to visit a few museums.

Artillery: You’ve said you made it all the way through a doctoral program at an Ivy League university without being asked to look at an auction catalog or think about market forces. What got you started in this area of inquiry?

Inge Reist: The Frick has an extraordinary photo archive consisting of about a million and a quarter photographic reproductions of works of art. The documentation is not just for the photograph itself; it’s basically documentation of the work it records, like a catalogue raisonné entry, that gives what I always describe as the biography of the work of art: where it has been, who has owned it, to which artist it has been attributed, where it has been exhibited, and the condition of the work. One of the areas documented most assiduously is the provenance. So the collecting history—which by its very nature references all of these auction catalogs that we have (about 90,000 in the library, going back to the 17th century, many of them annotated with prices and buyers’ names)—moves the needle along to the next level of ownership. The photo archive, together with Jonathan Brown [at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts], who’s always been a great proponent of the study of the history of collecting (in his case, more European), and the presence of the Getty provenance index and the interest that the Getty always had in the subject, too, led me to be interested in the history of collecting.

Is the history of collecting going to be a field of scholarly study unto itself?

Definitely. When I was in graduate school we were not encouraged to investigate issues of provenance, to derive meaning or interpretations from the actions of collectors and patrons. Art history was all much more about stylistic analysis and iconographic interpretations, and attribution issues. But the fact that people are reveling in interdisciplinary studies lately feeds into the fascination with the history of collecting. We are going to learn more about the socio-economic conditions that supported (or drained) collecting practices at a given moment in time. Economic downturns have impact on people selling their art; it’s often one of the first liquid assets to go. The cultural history element in interdisciplinary studies makes it quite an accessible field. If you look at how many museum exhibitions lately have been shaped around a particular collection, like the Clark Brothers or the Winthrop Collection, the Meyerhoff Collection—or even a dealer, in the case of Ambroise Vollard—that’s an indication, too, that not only scholars but the general public really enjoy the insights that come from knowing more about collectors themselves.

How did you move into the oral history component with living collectors?

I think of oral histories as being the first draft of the history of collecting in our own time. It’s from the horse’s mouth.  Collectors don’t always tell the truth, or they want to redact statements; often they don’t want the transcript to be available until a certain number of years after their death, but even if people can’t have instant gratification of hearing the interview with Steve Martin, they’ll have it eventually. We do this project together with the Archives of American Art. They do the transcription of these quite lengthy undertakings, usually a total of between two and four hours’ worth of interview. We’ve done Eli Broad, Alfred Taubman, Steve Martin, Robert and Jane Meyerhoff, Peter Lunder, Tony Ganz.

And will these be available to listen to?

Not always listen—read.

What’s an example of history repeating itself in the art world?

Nowadays, with such a hot market in contemporary art, people think, “Oh my gosh, this is crazy!” But Henry Clay Frick, J.P. Morgan, Henry Walters—all of the big Gilded Age collectors who are known nowadays for their Old Masters collections—started by collecting contemporary art. Frick moved into a different category altogether with his Old Masters and earlier 19th century; others stuck with it. William Henry Vanderbilt never stopped collecting contemporary.  

When people now talk about art being used as a financial instrument, and they think that’s such a new thing, I always say, think again. The sale of art is always a financial transaction, and people handled money in ways that were personally advantageous then as now. People don’t change that much; that’s one thing you learn through the history of collecting. Of course, bubbles can burst. When Frick was collecting his full-length portraits by Gainsborough, he paid top dollar, like getting an Andy Warhol. They don’t go for so much today. Things come and go, in and out of fashion; it’s all cyclical. The trouble is, nobody knows what the next cycle is going to be.

Does history help predict that?

I don’t think so!

Darn!

On the whole, if there’s a lot of new money out there, very new money tends to buy new art, which is kind of understandable when people are living in the here and now, not so much delving into history. In some instances—Frick being a good example—as people mature, both in business and collecting, they start becoming curious about other time periods, other cultures.  

Do you collect art yourself?

Not really. For many years, I was married to an artist, so what was on the wall were his paintings. My current husband and I buy art; we like art a lot. I don’t collect in any specific category. I don’t even collect books, because I work in a library. And the museums are so wonderful—well, everywhere, but especially in the United States. Those are my collections, in a way.

What are your favorite collections to visit in LA?

I love the Norton Simon. I’m very excited about the opening of the Broad Museum; I think that’s going to be really cool. It’s a fantastic building with great flexibility. I love the Huntington Library, but that’s almost like old home week for me. And Michael Govan has done great things with the LA County Museum of Art. The first time I went to see it, around 1980 or ’81, it had some masterpieces, but not really a robust collection. It’s amazing how that museum has grown over 35 years. The Getty Museum and the whole campus is an extraordinary monument to the culture of our times.

After lots of study of collectors and collecting, is there any general statement you can make about the motivation to collect? Is it a gene, a “bug,” a drug?

The one thing most serious collectors have in common is that collecting is an obsession for them. And they often have a desire for completeness, whether in a category or all of a certain artist’s different periods. There’s kind of an analytical approach that underlies what they collect. But true collectors are really just lured by the object. I asked one collector, ‘Has there ever been a work of art you bought that you regretted?’ And he said, ‘Yes, my first!’

“Seen through the Collector’s Lens: 175 Years of Photography” will take place at the Frick Collection on May 8 and 9, and will include 10 panelists speaking on collecting from the days of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert to the present. More information available at frick.org/research/center/symposia.

Powerhouse Brooke Garber Neidich, scion of legendary Chicago jeweler Sidney Garber, inherited her father’s business in 2008, and most recently made a splash with the jeweled silver swallows Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen sent down the runway with The Row’s Fall 2013 collection. Garber Neidich plans to expand Sidney Garber Jewelry to New York in Fall 2014, in a location near the uptown Whitney. But she has a business model as unique as her jewelry: she gives all profits to causes she believes in, including New York’s Child Mind Institute, which she co-founded with psychiatrist Harold Koplewicz, MD, and the Whitney Museum of Art, where, as co-chair, she has been instrumental in the Whitney’s move from crowded quarters uptown to a new Renzo Piano-designed headquarters downtown. In 2012, ELLE Magazine named her one of the Top 10 women in the art world.
We met on an arctic January day at the Standard Hotel, which “steps over” the popular High Line elevated park in New York’s Meatpacking District. The top of the Standard, known unofficially as the Boom Boom Room—where Garber Neidich’s restaurateur son Jon worked—is spacious and glittering, with a bar like a gold rocket at lift-off and pale leather banquettes. The sun poured in through floor-to-ceiling windows as we looked south over an icy Hudson River, the West Side Highway and the downtown Whitney building in progress, amidst meatpacking warehouses not yet converted to designer boutiques.
This is the last year the Whitney Biennial will take place at the Whitney Museum of American Art that New York has known since 1966; the Metropolitan Museum has agreed to rent the Breuer building uptown for a minimum of eight years, and the new downtown Whitney, at the intersection of Gansevoort and Washington Streets beside the entrance to the High Line, is due to open in late spring 2015… the biggest jewel of all.

Artillery: You started working with your Dad at an early age.
Brooke Garber Neidich: I wanted to be with him, but he was always at work. So I asked if I could come to the store, and if you were in the store, you were working—jobs appropriate for a child, like spraying the glass cases with Windex. I remember being there as early as six. By my teens, I was traveling with him to Europe, working with the artisans.

Sidney Garber jewelry is noted for its timeless, sculptural quality.
But I’m not an artist; my work is artisanal. There are artists who make jewelry, but I think anything an artist makes comes from a different place. And artists are different now; everyone makes everything. No one would call themselves a “sculptor” anymore. The art world is different now.

Look at Steve McQueen.
Steve McQueen’s a perfect example. Kara Walker. Kiki Smith.

Define an artist now?
An artist now is someone with a passion to create and to communicate.

Do you think your art “eye” is inherited, or did your Dad consciously teach you?
My Dad had a fabulous eye—and he wasn’t born into it, like I was. He had such an eye for detail, for quality, for choosing stones and pearls; I don’t think that can be learned.
He didn’t teach me explicitly, but what he did was ask questions. So many questions, even when it seemed like he should know the answers. As a teenager, I was embarrassed by all his questions! But that’s how my Dad learned everything in his life.

How did you start collecting art?
We didn’t have art at home. I liked museums, I bought little things at street fairs, but it never occurred to me to go to a gallery. I wasn’t hanging out down at Holly Solomon. Wouldn’t that have been great?
My husband Daniel and I started working with [interior designer and Andy Warhol partner] Jed Johnson, and he was a great mentor. We saw his office, which was full of art, and he was so passionate about it, we knew we wanted to find out about that. Beth Rudin DeWoody, who was on the print committee at the Whitney, said, ‘You’re collecting art now, you should join the print committee.’ She brought me onto the committee, and that opened so many doors. I met dealers, I met artists, I met other collectors—the whole art world. Now I get to talk to wonderful curators every day.
So I’ve had a lot of great teachers, who gave me permission to collect what I like. I’m not building a collection in a disciplined way. I buy for love. If I like it, and I can afford it, I buy it. You can’t hesitate. I do notice that what I like has a pattern—words, for instance.
I tell people, you don’t always have to have the best of the best on your wall. Are you buying it to sell it? No. You’re buying it to love it, so just plunge in.

Who are some of the artists in your collection?
I’ve collected Glenn Ligon for years, and Wade Guyton, thank goodness. Richard Tuttle, Kara Walker, Terry Winters, Kiki Smith, David Wojnarowicz. Ed Ruscha works on paper from the ’60s, Grayson Perry, Gavin Turk, Bob Gober, Ellen Gallagher, Al Hanson. I have a fantastic Marco Brambilla of a plane taking off from LAX over and over, with ’50s lounge music in the background. Jay Defeo, Joseph Kosuth, Josh Smith, Seth Price, Zak Pecop, Vito Acconci— and I’m dying for Lesley Vance and Etal Adnan! I used to collect internationally, before 2006. But after the recession, I made a commitment to collect American art. That’s how the Whitney was started, you know. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney offered the Metropolitan her collection of American works on paper plus a million dollars, and they turned her down. They said, we have enough of that stuff in the basement.

How will the downtown Whitney differ from the uptown Whitney?
When the Breuer building was built, the largest work of art was [the size of a chest of drawers]. That’s certainly changed! The downtown Whitney will have more wall space than anywhere else in the city, and look right out on the Hudson River. Renzo Piano, whose offices are across the street, is such a genius at using space. The gray boxes terracing off the back of the building are outdoor exhibition space, for sculpture and outdoor dance performances. We’re using the same landscape architect as the High Line, so the High Line will step down and flow right into the front of the new Whitney, through a space we’re calling our largo.

What are you most looking forward to at this year’s Biennial?
Three guest curators, with three very different points of view, each with their own floor and not much artist overlap. The Biennial is always exciting, but I think this year’s will be especially dynamic.