Depart foundation stefan simchowitz new york

They have dug in their heals.

Depart foundation stefan simchowitz new york: I spoke with Stefan

We have to break the system. We have to open it up. I systematically try to do this—successfully, I might add. You sell art, you work with artists, you advise clients. Are you a dealer? Are you a gallerist? I am everything and nothing. Can you elaborate? The key is to be a Swiss Army knife. When you pour water in a cup, it becomes the cup.

When you pour water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle. Be like water my friend. You have to be what you need to be in order to get things done. Every great dealer, every great gallerist in history has been a greater collector than most of their collectors. Every great dealer, historically, has been a great collector— Yvon LambertHeinz Berggruen, Ernst Beyeler—because every great dealer ultimately wants to collect the artwork themselves.

With dealers who do not collect in depth, there is no way they can be aligned with the interests of their artists.

Depart foundation stefan simchowitz new york: DEPART Foundation, is a (c)(3)

They have a saying in traffic school: speed kills. Does that apply here? Speed kills? Do you tell Usain Bolt not to try and break the world record, because if he does he might never be able to do it again? No, you go for it! But we just went through this Zombie Formalism period, and a lot of those abstract painters who churned out tons of canvases to meet frenzied demand have now seen their markets disintegrate, and their reputations sink.

It all happened very quickly, and ended in twisted wreckage. Because they were greedy and they were stupid. A car whose tires are not properly screwed is bound to crash if it goes fast, but if the car is well-built it can withstand speed. They were greedy, and I dealt with most of them. Their greed and stupidity killed them.

Depart foundation stefan simchowitz new york: The controversial collector/dealer explains

Every single artist who collapsed— Parker ItoMichael Manningall of them—I watched them first-hand alienate their initial collectors, not listen to advice, overproduce, and let their galleries get greedy and think they have 10 times more collectors than they actually did. I watched it happen. It crashes because it crashes. What if the vehicle was not supposed to go that fast?

Sometimes you might have a Ferrari, and sometimes you might have a Pinto. That seems to be what happened a lot with those artists. And it was pretty clear from the outset that none of them were Picassos or van Goghs. It was themselves. It was their own greed, their own stupidity, their own short-sightedness, their own arrogance. Sometimes you need to move fast, sometimes you need to move slowly, and the key is to have someone who can help regulate that.

The artist I manage, Petra Cortrightis doing very well today. She is one of the few people from that era who is not a casualty of the market, and this is evident to every single person who watches the market. Do you think that is arbitrary? Petra Cortright, the only one I manage out of that whole Post-Internet generation, was loyal to me and stuck with me through thick and thin.

She is doing fine.

Depart foundation stefan simchowitz new york: Stefan Simchowitz was born

Petra Cortright She is versatile and talented. She is versatile and talented, but she has also been well-managed. First of all, that story about Ibrahim Mahama is bullshit. Number one, it was proven to be incorrect. His gallerist in Italy, I believe, basically changed the way Ibrahim thought of me. It is a false story. It was a completely false negative narrative constructed by the media to create a negative story, and it did me damage.

It was incorrect. I cannot defend something that is technically false. It is incorrect. Who are some artists you work with, besides from Petra? Chehebar, who began collecting in the early s but moved to L. Film and television producer David Hoberman started buying art in the s, then stopped. He took up collecting again in the mids, buying work from the s and earlier by such artists as Milton Avery and Alex Katz.

For a while, he got caught up in the thrill of speculation. He did so by buying a Philip Guston drawing, and starting a drawing collection of small works without inflated price points. It will be interesting to see what happens. You kind of go where the art is. Since her mother and stepfather collected in L. I seem to have met a lot of people who are collecting.

However, in exchange for footing the bill, Simchowitz buys any new work at a discount. He serves a roster of clients whom he advises about the acquisition of contemporary art, offering advice, not only on works produced by artists under his representation, but also on art outside his immediate reach pieces typically for sale at galleries and auction houses.

The Simcoportrait is a self created genre of photography in which he has collapsed documentation of anything and everything into a single thing - this includes still life, landscape, street, self portraiture, and documentation photography. New York is exploding with new talent and though not every single one of these artists live in the city, every single artwork nonetheless contains the immediacy and energy packed into a New York Minute.

Mostly emerging artists and young artists living in downtown New York, this exhibition surveys some of the leading tendencies in new art making such as: updating action painting and abstraction with the toughness of the streets, synthesizing low pop culture into handmade heartfelt hybrids, taking conceptualism to new and absurd ends, organizing into collectives and bands and taking all your interdisciplinary art on tour, and bringing downtown punk attitude to assemblage, collage and sculpture.

One faction of this group uses the dark energy of the streets to make frank, confrontational punky poppy projects whether collage, performance, music or sculpture.