It’s not surprising that in a country where some speculate that all the frantic art buying is no more than creative money laundering by a few oligarchs, fragmentation prevails in the cultural realm. “There isn’t a connection between the art market and institutions,” says London dealer Anya Stonelake, who has exhibited work by Oleg Kulik, Olga Chernysheva and Valéry Chtak. “Last year loads of collectors went to Russia, but the art market is not quite ready yet. Some artists are selling things directly, and there are only a few good galleries.”

Although several of the most prominent galleries are now neighbors in Moscow’s Vinzavod district, enabling them to begin coordinating their opening nights, most of them aren’t yet particularly adept at marketing their exhibitions. They don’t do much advertising, nor do they regularly make catalogues for their artists. “It’s been more of a quick-sell business,” says Iljine.

For his part, Backstein thinks that the buying frenzy is really caused by a mismatch of supply and demand. “The problem of Russia is that we have a lot of collectors now and not enough artists,” he says. Iljine adds, “There are plenty of artists, but after 70 years of Communism, individuality is not blossoming as fast as in the free West and East.” His hope is that new talent in the more isolated provinces will soon be uncovered, with help from the brand-new Kandinsky Prize, Russia’s equivalent of Britain’s Turner Prize, sponsored by Deutsche Bank AG and the Moscow-based Art Chronika Culture Foundation.

Part of what is driving interest in contemporary Russian art is the entry of Russian collectors into the auction market. Recent sales have produced a number of records, especially for work by the post-1960s generation—the same generation, Phillips de Pury & Company head Simon de Pury points out, whose work he sold in Moscow in 1988 for all-time highs at a now-legendary Sotheby’s auction that briefly created a price bubble.

Last June at Phillips in London, La chambre de luxe, a 1981 two-panel painting of a domestic interior by Conceptualist Ilya Kabakov, made just over $4 million, setting the record for a work of contemporary Russian art at auction. Kabakov, 74, left Moscow in the 1980s and now lives and works in collaboration with his wife, Emilia, in New York; he had garnered an international following by the 1980s, mainly for large-scale installations in which he told the history of the Soviet regime through partial biographies of invented characters.

Like Kabakov, other nonconformists who rejected Soviet state ideology and Socialist Realism have also seen peak prices lately. A 1987 painting by hyperrealist Eric Bulatov, in which block Cyrillic letters spelling out the words Ne Prislonyatsa (Do Not Lean) hover over a hyperrealistic forest, made an artist’s record £916,000 ($1.8 million) at the same Phillips sale. Bulatov is still painting at age 74, and he had his first Russian retrospective at the State Tretyakov Gallery two years ago. A major retrospective of Kabakov’s work this fall will be split among several Moscow venues, including the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts and the Vinzavod.

The Ukrainian-born Kulik, 47, is best known for abrasive performances in the mid-1990s during which he imitated a dog, right down to wearing a collar and sitting in a cage, once going so far in his verisimilitude as to bite a curator. Publicity-generating actions like those have been credited with energizing the Russian art scene. Kulik is as famous for his curating as he is for his art making and has become something of a father figure to the current group of young Russian artists. Last year brought both a midcareer survey of his
own work at Moscow’s Central House of Artists and the vast Kulik-curated “I Believe” exhibition of Russian artists exploring the concept of faith, which coincided with the second Moscow Biennale and was the inaugural show in the Vinzavod art district. In addition to established galleries like Aidan, Regina and XL, the Vinzavod now encompasses studios for Kulik and several other artists.