What can one say about Stefan Simchowitz that Stefan Simchowitz hasn’t already tweeted, Facebooked and Instagrammed about himself? 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 who has become a magnet for attention – ‘heat’ in his own parlance – because of his self-described disruptive and sometimes dismissive approach to the established mechanisms of the art market and its means of legitimisation: museums and their boards (‘amoral’); MFA programmes and their faculty (‘losers’); galleries and their closely protected client lists (‘greedy’). 

Yet the force of his personality and his highly mediated – one might say digitised – self-regard has been put to use in the service of the artists he supports – such as Mark Horowitz, Petra Cortright and Kour Pour – and the clients who appreciate his star-friendly yet populist sensibility – Sean Parker, Orlando Bloom. Plus, he looked a lot less creepy in his skivvies on the cover of The New York Times Magazine than did Jeff Koons nude and pumping iron in the pages of Vanity Fair.