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Artful Distraction
“I went to a strip club for the first time in my life,” said Charlotte Sarkozy. It girls and oligarchs gather for Gagosian's Moscow show.
December 2008
Amanda Brooks and Tony Shafrazi.
December 2008
The Russian oligarchs and international It girls who gathered in Moscow
for a show organized by Larry Gagosian despite doomsday financial
headlines called to mind Mad magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman. “What, me
worry?” they seemed to ask as they sipped vodka and admired the Jeff
Koons artwork in the former Red October chocolate factory. Aaron Young’s
exhilarating, earsplitting motorbike performance piece had guests
whooping from the bleachers.
Some visitors had never been to Russia, and the scintillating evening
was just one of many during their trip. “I went to a strip club for the
first time in my life,” said Charlotte Sarkozy, the New York–based
sister-in-law of the French president. “The girls were beyond
beautiful.”
Meanwhile, 400 VIPs, including
Barbara Bush, Dasha Zhukova, Natalia
Vodianova, Olympia Scarry and Takashi Murakami traipsed upstairs for
dinner in a cavernous white hall. There, Leelee Sobieski was deep in
conversation (in French, thank you very much) with her father. The
actress is in Moscow shooting a film directed by Russian Alexander
Doulerain and American Jamie Bradshaw.
A week later Sarkozy joined another group of art lovers at the opening
of Liza Lou’s “Maximum Security” at New York’s Lever House. (It took Lou
and her staff in South Africa two years to hand-bead the prison fences.)
Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, Samantha and Aby Rosen, Jeanne
Greenberg Rohatyn, Dominique Levy (who is also showing Lou’s work at her
L&M Arts gallery uptown), Alberto Mugrabi and Jake Paltrow all dined on
oysters.
Talk eventually did turn to the economic crisis and what it will mean
for the art market. “I’m not nuts about money or capitalism,” claimed
industry heavyweight Tony Shafrazi. “But I think we’ll survive this.”
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- Russian Art,
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