Rising art star Josh Smith, famous for painting his name over and over, obsessively, on abstract canvases, has a well-considered strategy for success. “The best thing I could do for myself would be to not work. Just go to more cocktail parties and smile more. Go to more fashion shows,” he said.

Arrogant? Sure. Wrong? No. What’s interesting about Mr. Smith (and he knows it) is that talent at this specific moment in his career is–almost–secondary. Any art that’s been bought and displayed by Charles Saatchi (circa 2006), shown by Jeffrey Deitch (2007) and, as of next month, installed by Peter Brant and Stephanie Seymour in the collectors’ private museum is, if not a masterpiece, at least a solid market play. For Mr. Smith, for good or ill, fame is coming like a freight train. “He seems to be having a particularly good moment,” said Lisa Varghese, his dealer and a director of the Luhring Augustine gallery, in an understatement.

On a recent rainy afternoon, dozens of bright, messy Smith paintings and collages were stacked up against the walls and in piles on the floor of Mr. Brant’s stone barn-turned-museum in Greenwich, Conn. The collector’s estate is large and lush; polo ponies play in the paddocks adjacent to the Brant Foundation Art Study Center. For the past three weeks, the 35-year-old painter has been creating and installing works for his solo exhibition that will open at the bucolic space on May 7.

Relatively unknown until recently, the Tennessee transplant has abruptly become a darling on the New York art scene. His exhibition in Greenwich is just a precursor to a bigger fuss–he’s contributing a large grid of collages to the Venice Biennale and decorating the facade of its Palace of Exhibitions with large vinyl letters in a show opening in June...