Russian Art World Braces for Long Winter
发起人:linden  回复数:3   浏览数:4686   最后更新:2008/11/27 15:25:58 by linden
[楼主] linden 2008-11-27 15:23:18
Russian Art World Braces for Long Winter



Baibakov Art Center director Maria Baibakova

Sergey Popov, director of pop/off/art
[沙发:1楼] linden 2008-11-27 15:24:15

MOSCOW—Americans will be pleased to know that in Russia, at least, the dollar is on the rise. As bank clerks, financial consultants, journalists, and other professionals subject to layoffs seek to shore up their crisis-stricken finances by purchasing American money, the art world waits to find out if art will prove to be the latest commodity to face serious devaluation or, like the almighty dollar, another asset to invest in. That’s the question everyone in Moscow is trying to answer.
There’s been wild speculation about Dasha Zhukova’s Center for Contemporary Culture Moscow, which launched so spectacularly a few months ago as one of the venues of the Kabakov retrospective. As the tabloids speculate about the cancellation of the Zhukova-Abramovich wedding, insiders whisper that her project space, know locally as the “Garage,” will close sometime before New Year’s. But the Garage’s press office has denied the rumors, saying that it still plans to show highlights from the François Pinault collection in February 2009. And this Saturday, CCCM opens its latest show, an open air survey of video art, which includes works by Douglas Gordon. As part of the show, a screen is to be erected on a building belonging to the Department of Energy in the center of the city.
The Red October factory, site of Larry Gagosian’s triumphant exhibition in September, is making plans to welcome Baibakov Art Projects in the same space used by Gagosian. The Project’s director, Maria Baibakova, is the Courtauld Institute–trained daughter of Oleg Baibakov, CEO of Moscow's largest development project, Moscow City, a large (former) wasteland soon to be home to several skyscrapers’ worth of office space. The inaugural show is an exhibition of some 25 young Russian artists scheduled for December, and this is to be followed by a Basquiat retrospective in March.
Last but not least, another former garage will soon be filled with art. Stella Kesaeva, wife of the Ossetia-born tobacco magnate Igor Kesaev, once ran a gallery that introduced big money into Russia’s art world (she sponsored a large Kabakov show at the Hermitage in 2004). Now Kesaeva has announced plans to build a museum, with the help of some government funding, in an operating bus garage constructed in 1926–29 by Constructivist architect Konstantin Melnikov (who also built the space for Zhukova’s CCCM). The museum will show Stella’s private collection, which contains some big names of Russian postwar art, including pieces by Komar & Melamid. The museum is set to open in 2014, to coincide with Winter Olympics in Sochi.
While these sponsored projects are doing well, the city’s commercial galleries face a less certain world filled with the risks inherent in a suddenly illiquid clientele. It is not clear if Regina Gallery, home to Russian auction-record earners like Semyon Faibisovich and select international artists, still plans to expand to another floor of the Red October factory, a move the gallery planned over the summer. It is known, however, that Regina is hiring new staff for the space. XL Gallery’s associate director Sergey Khripun said that his gallery, which participates in Art Basel and Frieze, is not selling its pieces for less, because the prices are “justified.” The gallery is planning a retrospective of Irina Korina, a prominent, if young, installation artist, that opens in December or January. A lower rung of galleries seems decidedly less confident. Sergey Popov, director of pop/off/art, admitted in an interview that he provides “a new, more tangible price policy” for the collectors, meaning that he rewrites price tags. And everyone, it seems, is waiting for spring, when economists predict that the crisis will be at its most extreme and the Art Moscow fair in May will be a true test of the state of the art market. Since 2004, the fair has reported improved sales every year. The 2009 edition will assess if there’s been a correction and whether the economic crisis has affected the Russian art market’s blue-chip sector.
There is much uncertainty in the air, but so far no one’s panicking. Moscow’s professional art world is small, with approximately 300 paid jobs, and most of the dealers remember well the economic slowdown of 1998. If they survived ten years ago, when there was no art market to speak of, they can face the future with courage.
[板凳:2楼] linden 2008-11-27 15:25:57

Dasha Zhukova's new project at the Center for Contemporary Culture Moscow will be "Moscow on the MOVE," a Hans Ulrich Obrist–curated video art show.





The Red October factory, home to Larry Gagosian's exhibition “for what you are about to receive," which ran September 18 – October 2, is making plans to welcome the Baibakov Art Center in the same space.

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