The art scene across Russia is vibrant, well-funded and closely watched by the government. Will the financial crisis burst its bubble?

IT HAS TO be one of the most uninviting exhibition spaces ever created. The gray and green rooms are drab and deflating. The air is lifeless. The art is uninspired, pedantic – in a word, Soviet. After feeling the frenetic energy and life on any Moscow street, it’s baffling to walk into a room with so little of either.

Look closer, though, and you’ll see this installation is boring by design. Creators Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, a husband-and-wife team who emigrated from Russia to the United States many years ago – and whose work is being featured in a Moscow-wide retrospective – strove to transform their so-called White Hall into a replica of a Soviet-era museum – which is to say they wanted to make it totally uninteresting. (Dead flies hanging from the ceiling by strings are supposed to have perished from boredom.) The Kabakovs have made their point and made it well. Juxtaposed with everything else that’s happening on Moscow’s art scene – and it can now rightly be called a scene – this terribly boring place highlights just how much has changed in the city’s cultural landscape.

Insiders argue whether Russia is in the midst of a contemporary “art boom,” but there is clearly new energy (and a great deal of money) behind modern art. “In recent years, contemporary art has acquired a new status in Russia,” said Shalva Breus, printing magnate and publisher of Artchronika magazine, at a recent awards ceremony. “It has transformed from a marginal, semi-underground phenomenon into a powerful institution that holds a solid position in both the museum and exhibition worlds, as well as on the art market.” Old galleries are flourishing. New galleries and private museums have sprung up. Some of the nation’s richest and most creative people are involved (Roman Abramovich, the billionaire owner of Chelsea Football Club, is funding the retrospective of the Kabakovs’ work and international dealers and auction houses have taken notice). “There has never been a better time for Russian contemporary art,” says painter Timothy Caraffa.

Moscow, naturally, is the center of the activity. Winzavod, where the Kabakovs’ faux-Soviet museum resides, is a former wine-making facility reconfigured two years ago by a collector named Sofia Trotsenko to house galleries and exhibition spaces, along with a caf?, a clothing store and an art supplies shop. Among the tenants are such pioneers of the Russian art scene as Marat and Julia Guelman (M&J Guelman Gallery), Elena Selina (XL Gallery), Regina and Vladimir Ovcharenko (Regina Gallery) and Aidan Sakhalova (Aidan Gallery), all of whom opened galleries in the early, unpromising 1990s. It’s possible to spend hours at the complex – students, artistically minded young professionals and tourists do just that – which makes the trek to the industrial district behind the Kursk train station worthwhile.

XL Gallery’s Selina, who once cleaned the floors at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, says what’s happening now is not a “boom,” but the result of increasing sophistication and energy, and long-percolating changes in Russia’s cultural atmosphere. She and her Winzavod neighbors watched it happen from the inside, tracking the emergence of Russian underground artists such as Oleg Kulik (who once crawled around Red Square half-naked and on a leash) or Anatoli Osmolovsky. Outsiders, however, took note after oligarchs started dropping piles of money at auctions, such as the more than US$100 million Abramovich reportedly spent on paintings by Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon in early 2008. Matthew Brown, an art scholar who keeps a blog on the Russian art scene (www.izo.ru), sees changes occurring from bottom-up and top-down. There is “a natural desire to build what has been lacking in Russia, to fill a gap in the culture,” he says. And there is also “a sense of competition between the rich guys, and between rich Russian guys and the West.”

Some charge that Russian millionaires view artworks, especially pricey ones, as trophies, feathers in their new capitalist caps. Brown disputes this. “I don’t think Russian collectors are inherently more superficial than their Western counterparts,” he says. Their motives are similar, he adds, mixing aesthetics and speculation. “The joys of possession with associated benefits motivate collectors everywhere.” Painter Timothy Caraffa, for one, is uninterested in why paintings get bought. “I don’t care whether buyers have a genuine interest in art,” he says. “If it weren’t the new rich buying, no one would be buying because they are the ones with the money. And through buying they become more educated and open-minded.”

Unmistakably, though, the money provides excitement. When Viktor Vekselberg, who runs the investment fund Renova, spent more than $90 million to buy the entire Faberg? egg collection, it got people’s attention. Knowing one man spent millions on contemporary artworks adds to the appeal of Art4.ru, a private museum founded in 2007 by plastics magnate Igor Markin. Following his instincts rather than any formal training, Markin started buying art more than a decade ago. As his collection grew, he started thinking that he should share his art with others. He also loved the idea of opening a private art museum in Moscow, something that hadn’t been done since before the Russian Revolution. “I want to be the first,” he says. “I have not a huge collection, but a big collection, 1,200 pieces.” And he wanted people to see them.

Art4.ru is no simple vanity project, however. Like Markin himself, who, in a town of Mercedes and Bentleys, rides a bike to work and who appears for an interview with a scruffy half-beard and dressed in designer jeans and an open-necked shirt, the collection defies easy categorization. The bright space, not far from Red Square, features an intriguing, unusually broad range of styles and tastes from provocative photography to soothing abstracts to a rather scary, freakishly sculpted and stitched together female tennis player. With the exception of Matthew Barney and Philippe Pasqua, the artists displayed are Russians like Kulik, Erik Bulatov, Pavel Pepperstein, the Blue Noses and Evgeny Chubarov. Markin has integrated a number of other notable features that make the space feel unique and very much of its time. The bathroom, for instance, invites visitors to add to the graffiti on the walls. And the paintings in one room are accompanied by cards describing recent sale prices by the artist (nearly $2 million in Bulatov’s case).

A year ago, Markin was the hottest gallery owner in town. That mantle has been passed to Daria Zhukova, a clothing designer and former model who lived in California for many years, and who happens to be Abramovich’s girlfriend. Last September, after a series of hugely lavish parties that lured the art world’s elite to Moscow, she opened the doors to the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, an enormous space housed in a bus depot built in the 1920s. Although she hails from a well-connected family (and has been cagey about where the money for the gallery came from), the 27-year-old Zhukova can rightly claim to have created an amazing space, an 8,500sq m gallery divided into a maze of viewing rooms in one half, and a large open space in the other. Currently, the Garage is showing a sizable portion of the Kabakov retrospective, not surprising given Abramovich’s patronage. A selection of paintings called “An Alternative History” re-imagines Russian painting in the 20th century, seeking to understand the thinking of artists who tried to balance the demands of Communism and their own need to paint what they see and feel. And in the open space, the Kabakovs built a red train car, glorious images of Soviet propaganda festooning its interior, a pile of construction debris littering the exterior. (It’s a metaphor.)

On an October afternoon, guests included other artists, finely appointed women in scarily high heels, and a few people chatting blithely into their cell phones. Admission is free. All are welcome, says Natalia Sergeiviskaya, the Garage’s exhibition coordinator. The pairing of Zhukova and Abramovich, a couple as glamorous as it is reclusive, gives the place a certain cachet, but it has its own merits, she insists. “I think we really need this place,” she says. “Moscow museums do not have enough places for contemporary art.”

Both Brown and Markin say they’ve heard more museums are in the works, yet Markin says the various venues, including a show international gallery maven Larry Gagosian recently staged in an old Chocolate Factory, share the goal of promoting the work. “It’s not a competition,” he contends. “It’s more like a partnership.” Theoretically, that should broaden the market and the opportunities for Russian artists to show their work in their homeland.

It could also draw more attention from people who visit the galleries to disapprove. Father Boris Mikhailov, an art historian as well as a Russian Orthodox priest, was among the visitors to the Garage. He later visited the Pushkin Museum and Winzavod. He wants to keep up with the latest developments in the art world and plans to write something about it for the church’s newspaper. The Kabakov works on display were, he says, “dangerous,” “godless” and akin to “cultural weapons of mass destruction.”

This might not matter much if the general atmosphere in Russia weren’t already so volatile. Marat Guelman was attacked and beaten in his own gallery last fall when the rivalry between Georgia and Russia was heating up and Guelman was showing a Georgian artist. Speculation fell on ultra-nationalists sending a message. But in today’s Russia, there are always other possibilities and other potential culprits.

During Vladimir Putin’s presidency, journalists, businessmen, the owners of television stations and others came under tremendous scrutiny, and were at times severely punished, for crossing ever-shifting red lines.

Art has not escaped the government’s watchful eye. Last year, the culture minister denounced and nearly canceled an exhibition of Russian art in Paris, labeling many works a “disgrace” to the Motherland. The show continued only after several pieces were removed. “The government is taking notice of everything that is happening,” says Markin. “And if they do not like it, they close it down.” He should know, since one of the photographs pulled from the Paris exhibition – “Era of Mercy,” which shows two policemen kissing – hangs in his museum. (“I don’t have any problem,” he said, when asked if he thought the photograph would bring him more trouble.)

The other wildcard is the economic crisis, which threatens to affect the worldwide art market. Many oligarchs have seen their fortunes plummet, and some of the new players in the art world could lose interest. A slowdown seems a foregone conclusion, but can Moscow’s art spring outlive the chill? Winzavod has tremendous energy and a host of people involved who’ve been in the game too long to bail out. The Garage has deep pockets and more exhibitions planned. And Markin, while acknowledging that some changes may be necessary, seems to want to keep doing what he’s been doing.

Halfway through our interview, a man arrives hoping to sell some rare first-edition books. Markin looks through them, selects the ones he wants, then causally hands over about $1,000 in rubles he’d pulled from his pocket. He says his business has already been affected by the credit crisis; he’ll concentrate on acquiring less expensive works. “I can’t stop collecting,” he said later. “It’s like an affliction.”

If not constricted by financial troubles or contained by the state’s increasingly repressive instincts, this affliction could continue to spread. Someday it might even obviate the need to make a boring exhibition.