At 3 a.m. on Oct.

9, 2013,the 24-year-old conceptual artist Amalia Ulman woke up in a hospital in

rural Pennsylvania with a bone sticking out of her leg. She had been in an accident: The Greyhound
bus that was taking her from New York to Chicago to curate a show had smashed into a garbage
rig, killing one passenger and wounding dozens of others. She needed surgery. She also needed a
lawyer. Ulman knew that her parents, who lived in northern Spain, would be of no help. “Who do I
know in the States who’s not a kid on heroin?” she asked herself. After a moment’s thought, Ulman
instructed her nurses to contact a man she had met only once: Stefan Simchowitz, the controversial
44-year-old movie producer, Internet entrepreneur and industrial scion who over the last seven
years has pursued a manic quest to assemble the world’s most lucrative collection of emerging
contemporary art.

When Ulman’s bus crashed, she was traveling alone and without insurance, which might explain
why, following surgery, the hospital talked about moving her to a hotel. But Simchowitz enlisted a
Texas lawyer specializing in bus crashes, who insisted that Ulman undergo a second operation at
the hospital and then arranged that she be transferred by ambulance to a recovery facility in New
York City. He later filed suit against Greyhound for all of Ulman’s medical bills, which, after a
month in the hospital and an additional month in rehab, totaled nearly half a million dollars.
“Stefan was very supportive,” Ulman recalled. “He put all those ‘adult things’ together.”

More than supportive, Simchowitz had stepped out of a fairy tale — a godfather whose emissary
swooped down from the heavens to rescue Ulman from catastrophe. Ulman had not yet heard all
the stories about Simchowitz’s generosity and its fatal attraction for young, penniless artists whom
he lured into Faustian bargains. He would provide them with “all those adult things” they needed
and so often lacked: room, board, materials. In exchange for extraordinary support, Simchowitz
asked not for his artists’ souls but for their art, a deal that many of his protégés lived to regret. In
any event, lying alone in a hospital bed, broken and delirious, Ulman did not have the luxury of
worrying about a far-off day of reckoning.

Ulman met Simchowitz earlier that year after an email introduction from the editor of Sex
Magazine, an online arts publication, and was unaware of his reputation for aggressive
accumulation. She agreed to sell him two giant paintings covered in blue eyes, but she was
surprised by his brutal plans for them. Like a land developer subdividing a great estate, Simchowitz
planned to chop up Ulman’s paintings into roughly a dozen smaller units. “He wanted me to cut
the eyes into pieces so he could sell more paintings!” she said. Ulman, who put herself through art
school by working as a librarian, was taken aback by the proposed dismemberment, but she wasn’t
in a strong position to negotiate. “I was very desperate,” she said. “I didn’t have anything to eat.”
She ended up selling Simchowitz the smaller units for less than $150 apiece, adding that he could
“wipe his ass with them” if he really wanted to.

“He paid me nothing, basically, but at the moment it seemed like a lot,” she said. “And it was great.
It allowed me to go to Berlin. I think I lived three months out of that.”

Since 2007, Simchowitz has sponsored and promoted roughly two dozen young artists. In addition
to arranging sales for their work, Simchowitz often provides them with a studio, purchases their
materials, covers their rent and subsidizes their living expenses. Perhaps most consequentially, he
also posts photos of them and their work on his influential Instagram account, thereby creating
what he calls “heat” and “velocity” for the artists he supports, who have included market darlings
like the Colombian Oscar Murillo, the Japanese-American Parker Ito and the Brazilian Christian
Rosa, all under the age of 35. But Simchowitz’s methods call down the opprobrium of art-world
stalwarts, who are contemptuous of his taste, suspicious of his motives and fearful of his network’s
potential to subvert the intricate hierarchies that have regulated art for centuries.