A recession may not be best time to ask the Russian government for financial investments in culture, but at the very least it can offer moral support. Last Friday Minister of Culture Alexander Avdeev green-lighted a $100 million proposal to build a museum of contemporary art in Russia’s capital. The project’s instigators, Mikhail Mindlin and Leonid Bazhanov, serve as heads (executive director and artistic director, respectively) of the National Centre for Contemporary Art, an institution founded in 1992 and headquartered in Moscow. The center currently has branches across Russia and a collection of about 2,500 works of art and hosts exhibitions, lectures, and special programs for artists and scholars.

The future museum still lacks a name and a concrete concept, but Mindlin and Bazhanov shared some details about the project during a July 7 press conference at the center. The two, who would lead the new institution, plan to expand the center’s current home to include 25,000 additional square meters (269,100 square feet) of new exhibition space, as well as a café, storage facilities, and a cinema, among other amenities. Essentially, the center would transition from a small, state-funded institution to a large and complex one, with the new museum inheriting its management and resources.

Their plan is not exactly new. The center already expanded once, in 2004, adding a three-story building as part of a larger redevelopment plan that would have included a large hotel and financed the center’s activities with money from developers. The current proposal adapts the earlier plan to the realities of the current economic situation. For example, with most of Moscow’s building projects on hold, no commercial spaces are planned to accompany the future museum, and it’s unclear if the new project will be subject to an architectural competition. Mindlin, who trained as an architect, told ARTINFO that it would be too expensive to run an international contest, adding, “Maybe we’ll have a small competition among Russian-born masters.”

Predictably, the economy also affects the project’s funding — and its time line, which remains rather uncertain. In the current climate, the requested sum of $100 million will be hard to raise, and although the Ministry of Culture has approved the project, it is definitely not supplying the money. In fact, it cannot even approve the museum’s budget, whose large sum will have to be cleared during a session of the Russian government. If all goes according to plan, that approval will be gained, and the institution’s future determined, sometime in March.

For now, Mindlin and Bazhanov have two possible strategies: either wait until the crisis is over or form a partnership with gallerists and local businessmen who show an interest in contemporary art.

A number of such private persons were invited to the Ministry of Culture session on July 24. No press was allowed, but a source who was present told ARTINFO that nearly nobody came. The exceptions were Gary Tatintsian, owner of Tatintsian Gallery (which recently sold a small Jake and Dinos Chapman sculpture to the center at a discounted price after no one stepped up to buy it following its debut at a group show there four years ago), and Alexey Tsarevsky, head of Horizont Finance Company. Horizont is owned by Valery Nosov, who also owns ArtMedia Group, a publishing house that puts out two art magazines — Art+Auction Russia (a publishing partner of ARTINFO sister publication Art+Auction) and Blacksquare — and an arts and culture Web site, openspace.ru. Tsarevsky promised help from Horizont, including “consulting with the center on the predevelopment level and financial administration of the project.”

With friends like these, Mindlin and Bazhanov hope to finish the building sometime in 2015, which would put the institution in direct competition with another state-business partnership in the arts that’s on everyone’s lips these days.

Igor Kesaev, a prominent Russian businessman and the funder behind the Stella Art Foundation, which is run by and named after his wife, recently bought a Constructivist garage in the center of Moscow and plans to develop a museum out of the foundation’s collection. Stella Kesaev, who is credited with introducing the Russian art world to big money in 2004 after opening two gallery spaces (one for internationally renowned artists, one for Russian ones), gave ARTINFO no details beyond confirming that the plans exist. But it’s safe to say that the Kesaevs are in a good position to move forward with their ideas. The couple showed their private collection of postwar art in Vienna a year ago, and the foundation financed an Ilya and Emilia Kabakov exhibition at St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum in 2005, as well as Culture Minister Alexander Avdeevs trip to the Venice Biennale for the opening of the Russian Pavilion this year.

It is unclear, then, who’s closer to the governmental powers-that-be — the National Centre for Contemporary Art’s directors or the Stella Art Foundation. Because while the state department is hardly the place to ask for money, the Ministry of Culture can exert power and influence — by consolidating, for example, Russian business structures to invest in a national project. It is no secret that Russian oligarchs sometimes invest in art to rehabilitate their image with the Kremlin, buying works abroad and bringing them (or “returning” them, in patriotic terms) to Russia. If the state will recognize either museum as an important institution, the investments are sure to flow in.