*What a strange, touching story. I wonder who in future will attempt to save the obscure, moldering ruins of the oligarchs.
"Last year on September 16 a small yet seismic shift occurred in the taste of Russia's elite. Daria Dasha Zhukova - heiress, It-girl, occasional fashion designer and the celebrity girlfriend of Chelsea FC's billionaire owner Roman Abramovich - opened her Garage Centre for Contemporary Culture in a leafy suburb of Moscow, surrounded by the customary paparazzi.
"The novelty wasn't so much the gallery - though Moscow's answer to Tate Modern, so the blurb goes, was novel enough in a country where investing in art has become the latest craze among local oligarchs. Nor was it the opening party itself, your usual affair of glitz, international socialites and free-flowing Ruinart. Nor even the choice of the opening exhibition - works by Ilya Kabakov, the home-grown avant-garde artist renowned around the world, but, because of the controversy surrounding his art, rarely seen in Russia. No, the novelty was, rather, the building.
"Zhukova chose for her gallery not the usual gilded, Dubai-apeing kitsch beloved of Russia's elite. Nor even an intelligently picked gem commissioned from one of the world's top architects - a Foster perhaps, or a Gehry - to quash naughty rumours about the sincerity of Zhukova's miraculous transformation from Valley Girl to the new Peggy Guggenheim. Zhukova was cleverer still. She, or at least her advisers, chose to house her gallery in a converted, once-derelict bus garage. Not just any bus garage, mind. For this bus garage was a work of art in itself. This bus garage was built by none other than Konstantin Melnikov, leading light of a movement Russia has for decades consigned to the dustbin.(...)
