Personal auction of works by Damien Hirst, which Sotheby's arranged in London on 15-16 September, was positioned - and this is not the first time in the world of modern art - as a kind of breakthrough. Hirst's decision to sell new (established over the last year or two) of the auction was filed as a revolution in the art business since left behind and gallery owners and art dealers. They have become something like a shadowy middlemen who maliciously jacking up prices for raw materials and products, thereby ruining both producers and consumers. And it does not matter what Hirst and buyers of his works beggars can not be called. No matter what Sotheby's is taking a percentage of sales, it is quite comparable to those that ask for gallery owners. No matter that the agent Hirst Jay Jopling of White Cube gallery stuffing price for the twenty lots, and, apparently, earned in this auction round sum. Hurst spoke about all this as the democratization of the art trade. Well, the politician who promises to voters that democracy will become more instinctively does not trust. Similarly, the use of the term "democratization" in relation to art-business, by definition sounds suspiciously. Glamorous auction house Sotheby's strange looks in the role of an ally in the struggle for democracy, thought-provoking and price tags of a million pounds and even more for individual work.

In fact, this auction has demonstrated a new stage of evolution of Damien Hirst - a painter, he turned into a full-fledged entrepreneur, a sort of Richard Branson's art world. His entrepreneurial talents were evident long ago. It was he who organized the 1988 exhibition Freeze, where Charles Saatchi bought the first work in the spirit of what later dubbed BritArtom, marking the beginning of a trend, which has since been feeding more than one dozen contemporary British artists. During the 1990's he opened a restaurant in a prestigious area of Pharmacy in Notting Hill. After the closure of his situation was successfully sold by the same Sotheby's. More recently, Hurst founded the publishing house Other Criteria, which publishes books and reproductions, specializing in works of his fellow BritArtu; in October this year, the publishing house plans to open a store on the most expensive shopping street in London's Bond Street. Hirst is also a big collector, no one doubts that sooner or later it will open a museum at his country mansion. He quit drinking and smoking; farewell to the style of life a la Francis Bacon, who was previously an integral part of his bad-boy image, he remembered that he was over forty, and, it seems, has decided to adjust to the role of machines for the production of money.
  

Hirst auction was the largest event in the calendar of London secular audience. Queue willing to get on the evening auction on Sept. 15 stretched along Bond Street, but many were left with nothing: only allowed inside for tickets. Stampede was such that Sotheby's has opened additional rooms, where hundreds of people stood watching video. At the auction was attended by many friends of Hearst and his allies in the art world: Tobias Meyer, head of modern art Sotheby's, which bought the work for collectors, Norman Rosenthal, former head of the Royal Academy, the artist Paul Fryer (he was soon going to open the exhibition in London with Hearst scale : its cost has already reached one million pounds), the artist Rachel Howard, who for many years and earned that draw a point on the famous serial canvases, and her husband Hugh Allan - Hirst's business partner, manager and accountant Hirst, Frank Dunphy, nicknamed Rottweiler, who has meeting with the artist to keep an eye for an entertainer, such as clown Coco. Hirst himself at the auction was not: open secret at this time he was playing billiards with the world champion Ronnie O'Sullivan in the trendy Groucho Club. At one point he called Dunphy and complained that the nervous system can not choose what to order: spaghetti Bolognese or spaghetti carbonara. "Judging by how things are going here, - said Dunphy, - you can afford both."

  
For those who care about the romance of money, it was really a dramatic day. September 15, when held on the evening auction and Hurst successfully drove buyers fruits of their labors at 70 million pounds - the venerable bank Lehman Brothers in New York went bankrupt, leaving thousands of people in London lost their jobs. It seemed that the crumbling foundations of the entire financial world. Such shocks especially deeply felt in England, where a third of the economy one way or another are financial services. But I do not think that on that evening in the auction was attended by many British collectors. The target audience for Sotheby's now are not residents of the West, suffered from a falling dollar and the collapse of financial institutions: they seek out new rich from Russia, China and India, whose state put together, thanks to high commodity prices, political connections and a rapidly growing economy. The work of Hirst primary resource of this cultural neo-colonialism: once, as I understand it, we offered savages beautiful beads in exchange for gold, but now we offer them no less beautiful butterflies Hirst's dead in exchange for nefterubli.
  
Pre-auction exhibition seen by a staggering number of visitors - 21 thousand, and the auction went well from the beginning. The first unit of "Paradise can wait" (butterflies, diamonds, oil on canvas) sold for £ 930 thousand (including commission), which significantly exceeded expectations (estimate £ 300-500 thousand), the picture went to Jay Jopling. The first big test was the sale of "Kingdom" (the shark in the tank) - by my count, at least the fourth such work of Hurst. It's his trademark - a variation on the very same thing, made famous by Saatchi and which he then sold to the owner of a hedge fund to Steven Cohen for the unthinkable in those days £ 6 million. According to reports, the Cohen's had problems with the storage of sharks, and Hirst had to make another. But these difficulties did not discourage buyers. Lot went for 9.5 million pounds (including commission), which greatly exceeded expectations. "Golden Calf» (The Golden Calf) - gold-plated animal - rated higher than the shark, but its final value is not exceeded the preliminary estimate: 10.3 million pounds (including commission), it was bought Francois Pinault, owner of Christie's. It is assumed that Russian buyers were very active: the Russian-speaking assistant Sotheby's Alina Davey, following telephone instructions book, bought for them thirteen lots. By the end of the evening was sold works of art by 70 million pounds, above the expected 62 million on the second day of selling relatively small works, and the proceeds added another 40 million All lots were sold.

By the standards of the auction, Monday night will come down quite a dramatic, but it is surprising how restrained and polite was the reaction of the audience: polite applause, when a job offer the unexpectedly high price. Who or what is applauded? Perhaps the courage (and perhaps foolishly) buyer. But even at the wrong concert at the Moscow Conservatory where you can hear more lively hand-clapping, not to mention the local football match. Simply put, the applause - that namby-pamby. Such events leave a feeling of spiritual emptiness: when art is reduced to the amounts of monetary units, flashing on the scoreboard, many feel that the conscience of their uncleanness.
  
Now opolchatsya at Hearst. This is predictable. While it was not clear how much he earns, the press saw in him an object of interest bohemians, another star of the entertainment industry. Since the results of Sotheby's auction open to the public, it became apparent that he is making huge sums by selling works essentially factory production. Quite naturally, the press, including art publications expose questioned his activities. Before the Sotheby's auction Newspaper The Art Newspaper published an article whose author has hinted that in the vaults of the gallery White Cube, Hirst represents, accumulated more than a hundred unsold works. The implication was that Hurst came the crisis of overproduction, and this auction is something like a season of sales in a department store. The Independent has focused on Rachel Howard, former assistant Hurst (it is now a successful independent artist in the UK it is Haunch of Venison). The author points to the monstrous disproportion between the amounts that it receives from sales of own works and those that she did for Hearst. In yesterday's (September 17) Daily Mail published an article titled "World of Art in the City exceeded its shameless greed» (The greed of the art world is even more obscene than the City's), as well as to expose the dark past Irishman Dunphy - Hirst's manager, who allegedly supported the terrorist group IRA. British tabloids do not feed bread, give only celebrity to put into place and tell the world about his or her secrets. You can imagine, for example, a special investigative journalism, devoted to identify and locate long-lost father Hirst. As for the hero for the day, after the auction, he spoke quite in keeping with its brand plutocratic democracy: "I love art and this proves I'm not alone and we were all waiting for a brighter future».

Ray Johnson casts himself as equal parts opportunist, capitalist, conservationist and philanthropist.

As a kid, he made his own arrows and sold them to a string of sporting goods stores. A stint as a Lutheran minister inspired him to revolutionize the funeral business. A fascination with wooden duck decoys led to the Wooden Decoy national retail chain.

Wealthy from real estate deals, Johnson has poured millions more into another accidental discovery - 20th-century Russian Realist painting.

Slender, silver-haired and 66 years old, Johnson has spent the past quarter of his life discovering, purchasing and accumulating the work largely ignored by the contemporary art world. He estimates his collection is 14,000 pieces - curators at Moscow's state-run Tretyakov Gallery have told him there is none larger.

Oddly, no major American museum has shown interest until now - the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, today opens an exhibition of Russian art drawn equally from the Tretyakov and Johnson collections. "In the Russian Tradition: A Collection of 20th Century Paintings" is on view through mid-March.

Now, after single-handedly developing an American market for this period of Russian art, Johnson suddenly finds himself in a struggle with Russians determined to repatriate the artwork.

"I look at my collection as America's fair share," Johnson says, pointing to the unavailability of Soviet art through much of the latter 20th century. "If I hadn't collected it, I don't know that anybody else in this country seemed disposed to do it on their own."

JOHNSON OF ALL TRADES

An infant when his father died and raised by a mother disabled by polio, Johnson developed quiet senses of independence, entrepreneurship and social stewardship while growing up on a farm in Iowa. Of all his disparate ventures, none was more out of left field than art.

"Probably the closest thing to art in our home was a calendar," he says.

He first explored art through catalogs and began buying prints of classic French Impressionist paintings, along with antique frames to go with them. During his ministering in the northern Minnesota communities of Crosby-Ironton, he often exhibited his prints to a public he felt otherwise had little chance to study the great Impressionists.

Johnson has no heritage or innate interest in anything Russian, beyond his daughter's pursuits in ballet. But after Mikhail Gorbachev decentralized the Soviet Union's economy, it opened the door for potentially global exposure to a half-century of the country's art.

Johnson, who fostered a personal taste in artistic realism, saw this branch of Russian art as an open niche for enjoyment and investment. He amassed the collection by purchasing hundreds of paintings at a time from smaller collectors in London, Germany, Turkey, France, Italy, Mexico and Canada.

"The world recognizes the greatness of Russian ballet and Russian writers. Why not visual art?" he says.

"Most people know Russian art is dreary, somber, colorless, that it was all produced by the state, that it's all propaganda. That's the stereotype, right?" Johnson continues. "It's the stereotype our government wanted people to believe, and if enough people believed that, nobody would go to Russia."

RUSSIAN CARETAKER

Married 27 years, Ray and Susan Johnson live in a wide block house of granite and marble, built by one of the daughters of beer magnate Theodore Hamm, on Lake Minnetonka's Browns Bay.

"We're really not the formal people this house might imply," he says. "I don't think of myself as being wealthy at all. I'm a poor guy who's responsible for a lot of money."

Many of the artists represented in Johnson's collection, or at least the ones on view in his museum and home, were heavily influenced by the French Impressionists. The collection is dominated by landscapes and still lifes, with humanity unfolding through the etched and painted snapshots of farm and factory work and the mundanity of domestic life.

Few Americans will recognize the names at the foundation of Johnson's collection, despite their achievements within Russia. Aleksandr Gerasimov, tightly connected to Stalin's regime, was regarded during his prime as the "People's Artist of Russia." Johnson says he owns 375 pieces by Sergei Tkachev.

Perhaps because of the government-imposed shroud covering the art until the late 1980s, art historians outside of Russia are just beginning to explore its place in contemporary art. Johnson senses a prejudice to art created and influenced under governmental rule. The reasons are more complex, one local authority says, for the West's indifference to this realm of art.

"Art of the Renaissance was heavily controlled by the church, and we don't look back on that as not being worth showing," says Lyndel King, director of the University of Minnesota's Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum.

King first visited Russia in the mid-1970s. He organized a well-received exhibition in 2001 of Russian avant-garde art from the early 20th century and is preparing another for 2005.

Rather than prejudice, she suggests, Realism lost to Abstract Expressionism in dictating the tone of the dialogue for contemporary art.

"Figurative art wasn't as highly valued, but it's making a comeback, along with art that makes certain political statements," King says. "I don't think we'll know for another 10 years, at least, how Americans and Europeans embrace the Russian Realism."

The Smithsonian exhibition could foster a place for this art, King says. The exhibition came about through the Smithsonian's relationship with Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery, which turned Smithsonian directors onto Johnson's collection.

BUILDING A BRIDGE

Johnson opened the Museum of Russian Art two years ago in a little-trafficked business park in Bloomington and has loaned pieces to major museums in Europe, Korea, Mexico and Canada.

Johnson believes he can stamp an indelible legacy by furthering American and Russian relations through the arts. But to the Russians who have lobbied Johnson to sell the work back to Russian hands, he insists it isn't available.

"I think there are people who think I've taken advantage of the Russian people ... but all I did to those artists was make them a lot of money," Johnson says. "I brought the collection to the US to share it with the people here. My museum is a good first step, but only a first step in keeping it here. If it went back, that would be it."

Johnson is moving the Museum of Russian Art in mid-2005 to a converted Spanish-style church at Interstate 35W and Diamond Lake Road in Minneapolis, opening the doors with the exhibition now on view at the Smithsonian. Johnson also is recruiting corporate sponsors - the chief donor, to this point, has been country music star Ronnie Dunn, who has donated $ 3 million to Johnson's museum.

"I'm going to take this Russian art to a new level," he says. "I'm really only one person, but what I'm involved in is really big. So watch for the smoke."