At an ArtTable power lunch in early May, keynote speaker
Lisa Dennison got the room buzzing with a comment that the person who'd had the biggest impact on the art market lately is a 28-year-old woman. "Stay tuned," the
Sotheby's executive said. A week later, news broke that 26-year-old former model
Daria "Dasha" Zhukova would be opening a Moscow contemporary art center this fall and that her boyfriend, the 41-year-old Russian billionaire
Roman Abramovich, dropped more than $110 million combined for the
Lucian Freud's
Benefits Supervisor Sleeping at
Christie's and
Francis Bacon's
Triptych at
Sotheby's. Is she Dennison's mystery woman? That's our guess. Pressed for comment, Dennison replied, "My lips are sealed."
"Who's that Girl?" originally appeared in the July 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's July 2008 Table of Contents.