January 2009

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In a week dominated by news of financial meltdown, the art world proved its increasing strength and vigour with two headline-grabbing events: Damien Hirst’s record-breaking Sotheby’s sale, which raked in a total of £111m, and the opening in Moscow of the Garage Centre for Contemporary Culture (GCCC). Admittedly, how much either had to do with art, as opposed to celebrity culture, is up for debate.

Hype surrounding the GCCC was focused on its founder, Daria Zhukova, perhaps better known as the girlfriend of Chelsea FC owner Roman Abramovich. Clearly not content with a clichéd WAG lifestyle, the glamorous 27 year-old has become one of a new generation of Russian art collectors that Marcel Theroux has dubbed ‘oligarts’ in his upcoming TV exposé. Daria – known in voguish circles as Dasha – has already launched her own designer-clothing label, and is regularly photographed with fellow socialites including Frederick Windsor and Camilla Fayed (shown above).

Although born in Russia, Daria lived with her mother in California before studying in London, where she took a degree in homeopathy. Already she has shown a precocious talent for self-promotion, but her interest in art history is more difficult to trace. Critics have inevitably labeled her a neophyte, but she has brushed this confidently aside, explaining how much has been learnt through osmosis: her father has always been 'really into architecture' and her two best friends are artists. (Perhaps there’s a gallery-owner lurking in all of us.)

GCCC has been heralded as Moscow’s first private arts centre and is housed, with some irony, in a former Soviet bus garage, a vast redbrick parallelogram built by the Constructivist architect Konstantin Melnikov in 1928. Its spiral staircases and complex ceiling windows justify this building as a work of art in its own right, and the cavernous 8,500 metre squared interior has already inspired favourable comparisons with Tate Modern. The complex is also to include a café and bookshop, adding up to a project that would have been unthinkable 20 years ago.

Precise details about the gallery are still shrouded in mystery. Little is known about the permanent collection, for instance, but it seems likely that Abramovich’s recent acquisitions, Lucian Freud’s Benefits Advisor Sleeping and a Francis Bacon triptych, which sold for £17m and £43m respectively, will feature. And perhaps we should now expect to see the odd Hirst creeping in; certainly the pair presented a united front when they arrived together at the recent Serpentine Summer Party.

The grand opening of GCCC last week saw Jeff Koons and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer rub shoulders with the celebrated émigré artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov and, moreover, ravenous press interest. There’s certainly no doubt that Daria Zhukova provides some glamour for the glossies, but as far as real art is concerned, is she an astute aficionado or dilettante dabbler? The jury is still out.

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