Kate Sutton

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  diary December 22, 2009

  Village People

  Moscow

  IN 2007, Larry Gagosian brought Jeff Koons, Piotr Uklanski, and Richard Prince to Barvikha, the “Luxury Village” forty minutes outside Moscow, temporarily setting up shop upstairs from Alfa-Bank and across from the Lamborghini showroom. Few in the art public ever made the trek—unfathomable traffic and a lack of public-transportation options played at least some part—and most critics based their venomous reviews on press images. A certain disenchantment, then, greeted the ArtChronika Foundation’s decision to host the December 10 award ceremony for the third edition of its annual Kandinsky Prize

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  diary December 05, 2009

  Moon over Miami

  Miami

  THIS YEAR, I PAID my Miami penance up front, with back-to-back red-eye flights—seventeen hours’ worth—from Moscow. In return, I was rewarded with indecently warm weather and the delicious stupor of intense sleep deprivation. This meant that by the time I arrived at Emmanuel Perrotin’s gallery for dinner on Tuesday night (after pantomiming the address to my French cab driver), it already felt like the afterparty. The good-natured dealer had flown in the majority of the participating artists—among them Matthieu Mercier, Bernard Frize, and Daniel Firman—for the group exhibition and two solo shows

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  picks December 01, 2009

  Vladimir Logutov

  “Boom” marks Samara, Russia–based artist Vladimir Logutov’s first solo show at this gallery. The tightly conceived exhibition follows on the artist’s experiments with compression (for instance, a project in which Logutov commissioned steel workers to pound a railroad tie into a knot) by focusing instead on tropes of explosion—albeit in a highly controlled and technically convoluted manner.

  The show centers on the four-channel installation Pause, 2009, which features projected videos in flickering stasis, as if someone had pushed the Pause button on the DVD player. Logutov uses his own footage of

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  diary October 19, 2009

  Everything Counts

  London

  HAILING A CAB to Primrose Hill last Tuesday for the opening of the modestly titled Museum of Everything, one of many events coinciding with the Frieze Art Fair, I found the queue to get in stretching around the block, with rumors of an estimated forty-minute wait. Thankfully, I’d had the foresight to share my cab with a prominent London dealer––it helps to have an in when it comes to outsider art––and we were discreetly shuffled inside.

  The Museum of Everything was masterminded by collector James Brett, who invited noteworthy figures from Hans Ulrich Obrist and Jeremy Deller to Nick Cave and

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  diary July 09, 2009

  Manchester United

  Manchester

  ON MY WAY TO LAST WEEKEND’S OPENING for the Manchester International Festival, fellow passengers on my Moscow-London direct could hardly stop grumbling about the recent heat wave. Discouraged by the reports, I was pleasantly surprised to find Manchester in its characteristically dismal shade, stuck in that half-rain state that suits a city of bummed cigarettes, franchise sandwich shops, and red-tag sales at Primark. As if to make up for the weather, I was greeted at the train station by an army of alarmingly cheery MIF volunteers literally elbowing one another out of the way to hand me a festival

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  diary April 28, 2009

  Love Hirst

  Kiev, Ukraine

  LAST FRIDAY, the PinchukArtCentre in Kiev delivered its “Requiem,” a sprawling selection of Damien Hirst’s recent works, largely culled from private collections. After a year of planning and an eight-week-long install (running up to the final hour before the opening, when assistants were busy hair-spraying a giant ashtray), the exhibition is the culmination of the close friendship and creative collaboration between Hirst and collector Victor Pinchuk. The private view took cues from Bulgakov, with a beaming Pinchuk—playing the part of Margarita at the Midnight Ball—welcoming the glittering

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  diary March 24, 2009

  State of Grace

  Moscow

  LAST THURSDAY, Moscow’s Garage Center for Contemporary Culture at long last reopened with a survey of works from François Pinault’s collection. According to curator Caroline Bourgeois, the exhibition’s title, “A Certain State of the World?,” was punctuated long before the economic crisis; nevertheless, over the past few months, this question mark has presided over the Garage’s activity––or, more fittingly, inactivity, as the space has remained closed since its much-feted Ilya and Emilia Kabakov retrospective last September. In the time since, the Moscow art world has occupied itself by inventing

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  diary September 26, 2008

  Red Planet

  Moscow

  Last Tuesday, twenty-seven-year-old Daria “Dasha” Zhukova inaugurated her Garage Center for Contemporary Culture in Moscow with three projects by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov. The exhibitions were part of a multisite retrospective funded by Zhukova’s Iris Foundation—as well as by a personal donation from Zhukova’s boyfriend, Roman Abramovich, whose splashy debut in the auction houses last year (where in one week he plunked down nearly $120 million on a Freud and a Bacon) set pulses racing. Easily one of the most coveted invites of the year, the scramble for invitations became even fiercer with the