https://www.thefp.com/p/stefan-simchowitz-senate
PASADENA, CA — Stefan Simchowitz, 53, is no one’s idea of a viable candidate, including his own.
“I have no illusion that I can win or that I stand a chance to win, which is also quite liberating, because I’m not running to win a campaign. I have no prayer,” he tells me.
Simchowitz, who is running for Senate as a Republican in a seat that has been held by a Democrat for 32 years, is perched at the kitchen island in one of his four homes, an updated Victorian farmhouse on an acre in Pasadena that he’s been building into an exhibition space and artist residency for the past year or so. He calls it Red Barns.
In a tan Altadena Hardware shirt and one of his signature bucket hats, the contemporary art dealer once dubbed “the Art World’s Patron Satan” offers me sparkling water and a bite of his blueberry muffin. Unlike the Democrats vying for Dianne Feinstein’s open seat—Representatives Katie Porter, who has a $12 million war chest and Adam Schiff ($32 million)—and the Republican front-runner, former L.A. Dodger Steve Garvey, Simchowitz doesn’t seem concerned with shaking hands, kissing babies, or winning votes.
“Sometimes if you know you’re going to lose you can only win,” he says. Stefan sees this campaign as a “vehicle to sell his ideas.” In other words: a performance art project of sorts. How else to make sense of this Democrat-turned-Republican, with no political experience, throwing his hat into the ring?
This outsider approach has served him well as the enfant terrible of the art world, where he’s circumvented the closed-circuit system of MFA programs, critics, museums, galleries, auction houses, and curators that decide whether an artist is marketable, and for how much. Simchowitz came up by finding starving artists—literally on the brink of starvation, he claims—on Facebook and Instagram, then paying for their studios, materials, and sometimes entire bodies of work outright, before flipping them to buyers, or holding them in his extensive private collection.
His clientele—which historically includes tech founders who exited their companies and started itching for a Josef Albers; newly flush poker players; and A-list entertainers—trust him implicitly. “He sees opportunities and then he puts a spotlight on them,” Brian Butler, a longtime gallerist in L.A., tells me. “He’s got a tenacity about him.” (Butler himself is voting for Katie Porter, but says he’d vote for Simchowitz “if I was a Republican.”) Though Butler calls Simchowitz a “super mensch,” he conceded he has a “gruff exterior.”
While his bluntness and allergy to pretension has earned him fans, the management class of the art world scorns him with equal passion. Many collectors, dealers, and artists won’t work with Simchowitz, or anyone who does, arguing that he exploits struggling artists by buying up all their work, then artificially pumping and dumping it. Another L.A. gallerist once called him a “sociopath” and compared him to Charles Manson before walking it back.
