IZO

Media magnate Anton Nossik caused quite a stir (449 comments at time of writing, plus multiple responsive posts elsewhere) when he published a gruesome photo of a dead Palestinian fighter on his blog under the caption "Well done" (dolboeb, not safe for the squeamish). You may or may not share Nossik's point of view, but what is remarkable, from a Western perspective, is that such a well-known figure should express himself so uninhibitedly in a public forum. Русские штучки indeed.

Apparently the publisher of Open Space, Valeri Nosov, is pleased with the independent editorial line taken by the art section editor Ekaterina Degot in connection with the Kandinsky Prize controversy (which allays fears expressed on IZO earlier).

ArtKhronika has published its list of the 50 most influential people in the Russian art-world (spdr, in Russian). Of course, these lists are at best an advertising gimmick and at worst an attempt at ingratiation, but we can't resist them. Abramovich and Zhukova are at no. 1: all they've done, for the most part, is ante up some cash, but anyone can comprehend the reasoning behind this choice. I can't quarrel with Marat Guelman at no. 2: his Russian Povera project is an ambitious attempt to create a new paradigm for Russian art. It's odd to see the Trotsenkos, Sofya and Roman, owners of Vinzavod, at no. 9: they're landlords - with vision of course, but basically landlords. But one can't quarrel with Ekaterina Degot at number 10. Last year, as I recall, Degot didn't figure at all; this year, I hear, she was at or about no.1 on some kind of expert-panel voting, but downgraded later. This must reflect the considerable influence of the Open Space site, where she is art editor. Open Space's owner, Valeri Nosov, who while he was in government employ was a kind of art-world Voldemort (even I wasn't allowed to mention his name), has recently emerged a little from the shadows. Let's hope he figures out a way to keep Open Space going through the Crisis, and, too, that ArtKhronika continues to expand its web presence.

Short biography of Alik Sidorov (see IZO earlier today) (RIA Novosti, in Russian). His last project appears to have been an unusual-looking ultra-high-format camera (paralleltravel, in Russian).

Alik Sidorov, co-editor of A-Ya, the journal of unofficial art published in Paris in 1979-80s, has died in Moscow (Open Space, in Russian).

Saving a post on LiveJournal nowadays you are offered the below option; according to Alexei Plutser-Sarno, accepting such an option would mean you were 'disseminating information' and mass-media laws would thus apply to the post (plucer, in Russian):

I hereby give third parties the right to reproduce or disseminate all of my materials as a whole or in part... (Настоящим предоставляю право третьим лицам воспроизводить и/или распространять все мои материалы целиком или любую из частей...)

Biznes in Goa (galerist):

It turns out that the interview with the boss of Goa's main jail in "the first edition of the first Russian newspaper" was not accidental, it was a SIGNAL. That the newspaper has powerful protection which it can offer to Russian businessmen for a price (if you can call little massage parlours or rental agents for cheap little houses businesses). That India is full of corruption and groaning under the weight of bribery.

Info on the Russian edition of Art+Auction (press-release.ru, in Russian).

Spider has some comments and questions about what he calls "Nosov's pseudo-arrest" (spdr, in Russian):

1. This subject came up for the first time last Friday in exactly the same form. The next day our hero [Nosov] alive and well calmly accepted congratulations at the launch of Art+Auction.

2. [Nikolai] Molok [editor of ArtKhronika] knew about this matter, and being a cautious, professional person he said he was waiting for further confirmation. For what reason did he publish it today without double-checking?

3. In M. A. Guelman's LiveJournal, Mr Kashin suggests (fuck knows if it's true or a lie) that our hero is in London. This is also strange if true, given the undertaking not to travel (which is probably the case, because it's a common measure).

Spider adds that as things stand ArtKhronika has made a sizeable faux pas and is looking bad.

According to Open Space, ArtKhronika has apologised for the erroneous information posted on its website (see previous post). Well, that's all very well, but it's all over the Russian internet (Open Space, in Russian).

Extraordinary news: I can't vouch for any of it: I'm translating it exactly as it is, with the links, and appending the Russian below (kotomish):

According to information in ArtKhronika, Valeri Nosov, the former deputy Finance  Minister of the Moscow Region and the owner of Artmedia Group, which publishes the Open Space web-portal, the magazine Blacksquare and the Russian Art+Auction, the first number of which has just been published, has been arrested. Nosov is accused of financial and property crimes. According to information received by Artkhronika, at the end of the autumn Valeri Nosov was let go from his post in the Moscow Region government, his passport was confiscated and he gave an undertaking not to travel. Nosov is involved in the same case as ex-Finance Minister of the Moscow Region government Mr Kuznetsov and his spouse Zhanna Bullock, who in the summer managed to leave Russia.

http://artchronika.ru/item.asp?id=116

That's all.....

UPDATE: Dear readers! The information about Valeri Nosov, owner of the company Artmedia Group, has not been confirmed. Please accept our apologies.

http://artchronika.ru/item.asp?id=118

http://www.openspace.ru/news/details/6563/- Open Space has discovered that the news has been removed, but really it had to be removed, it exposed Artkhronika to criticism.

But а little worry remains... And rumours have been flying for four days.... And talk of problems for the last six months... What's going on?

Back to my commentary now: According to Kommersant, Mr Nosov at some point took over Mr Kuznetsov's job as Finance Minister but resigned in late October.  (PRagent, in Russian). That of course could be the source of the "rumours" mentioned by kotomish and seems to confirm one part of ArtKhronika's original claim, that Mr Nosov was let go from his post. Apparently the budgetary situation in the Moscow Region is complicated:

An anonymous source of Kommersant in the banking sphere explained that the region's current problems are connected to the destruction of the method of atttracting investment that was created by the former Minister of Finances of the region Alexander Kuznetsov and his deputy Valeri Nosov.

More info: Marat Guelman carries the same ArtKhronika report but then adds that Nosov is, according to [Open Space writer Oleg] Kashin, in London. A comment to Guelman's post by Kashin also states that Nosov is in London and that he has not run away (galerist, in Russian).

On another LiveJournal site there is speculation that this affair might be part of a "corporate war" between Open Space and ArtKhronika (art_links, in Russian).

.I can only add that if anything does interfere with Mr Nosov's publishing activities, it will be a significant loss to the Russian art world. Open Space has very quickly established itself as a major forum and the first edition of Art+Auction looked very good.

Marat Guelman says that the new snob.ru portal is getting its content by means of nice girls who phone you up and ask for commentary or permission to copy-paste from your LiveJournal. He also suggests that the popularity of Eurasian nationalism is down to boredom (скука) (galerist, in Russian):

I think that Kurekhin, Timur Novikov, Limonov and Dugin represent the consciousness of this boredom. I used to know Dugin well. ... He is a talented fringe figure who writes speculative texts, the main point of which is to be original. ... He's not a fascist. He's certainly not a nationalist. In this country there are more followers of Tolkien than nationalists.

Radio interview (by telephone) with Ekaterina Degot about the Kandinsky Prize (Moskva FM). According to Degot, the Deutsche Bank representative applauded as Belyaev-Gintovt made a gesture like a Nazi salute. UPDATE: Ruth Addison, who works at Triumph Gallery, writes to contradict this: 

As for the alleged Nazi salute, I was there. I did not see anything like that. I saw Beliayev hold up the award. I heard Osmolovsky shouting. I applauded. I saw many other people in the hall applauding, including the Deutsche Bank curator, who turned towards Osmolovsky and appeared to ask him to be quiet as Beliayev could not make himself heard. ... the Nazi salute accusation ... could have serious consequences for the reputation of a respectable European curator who has done nothing wrong and it should not stand.

Report on Art + Auction launch (Izvestia, in Russian):

The supper in honour of the appearance on the Russian media scene of the leading publication about the art-market and collecting Art + Auction was well-attended and lively. The owners assembled their potential readers - collectors and millionaires - in the Kasta Diva restaurant. Among the guests were businessman Pavel Teplukhin, producers Valeri and Alexander Rodnyansky, media-magnate Konstantin Remchukov, Artem and Darya Mikhlkov and TV presenter Sofiko Shevardnadze.

The Kandinsky Prize skandal seems capable of evolving as a confrontation between the old-established contemporary art magazine, ArtKhronika, which sponsors the prize, and the new stable of titles from Art Media Group: the Open Space website, where the Art section is headed by Ekaterina Degot; Blacksquare magazine; and the new Russian Art + Auction. In her most recent commentary on Open Space, Degot describes "Dugin's Eurasian nationalism", of which Belyaev-Gintovt's work is an expression, as "a point of consensus between Russian society and the authorities"; she implies that ArtKhronika, which expresses the views of the "new Russian ruling class", shares this consensus (Open Space, in Russian):

I don't know now how to behave towards ArtKhronika magazine. To advertise in it now is not an innocent act any more. To write an article for it is to support a certain kind of politics.

A pilot issue of Dazed & Confused is out in a limited run of 1000 copies (Look At Me, in Russian).

Excerpts from Alex Wengraf's end-of-year newsletter: 

Lord Black remains in jail, but his malign influence is still on the Daily Telegraph (Torygraph) – when I arranged the wedding announcement in the paper I was informed that the ‘house style’ demanded I write the illogical May 24 instead of British 24th May – “because we used to be owned by an American company”. Trivial but it proves that even the rabid conservatism of the Telegraph is phoney (and Conrad Black is Canadian). ...

Today everyone who likes old music is happy to listen to Verdi’s Requiem, or any of the above works or Mediaeval motets to the Virgin, and dozens of others, be they Catholic, Protestant, Jew, or indeed atheist. Yet many of those same people, like my mother’s plumber, as well as educated bourgeoisie, coming into my apartment in Lausanne will ‘comment’ that I have a Madonna and a crucifixion and a Moses striking the Rock (respectively Florentine, Flemish and Venetian all 16th), a Magdalen weeping and an Ivory corpus and other religious images. You can see them wondering and sometimes more than wondering, whether this does not belie my professed atheism (no, it doesn’t).

You can read the whole thing (click on 'annual report'), and browse Alex's stock here (wengraf.com).

Art Media Group General Director Maxim Maslakov's Q&A (Lenta.ru, in Russian).

The first Russian number of Art + Auction is out now (Open Space, in Russian); in it you will find my article on Alex Melamid's recent work.

The General Director of Kommersant newspaper, Demyan Kudryavtsev, has defended the paper against suggestions that it used a photograph of the Russian First Lady, Svetlana Medvedeva, to advertise watches by Breguet (Glossip, in Russian).

The Russian Vogue tenth-anniversary charity auction of custom-made matryoshka dolls, conducted by Yuri Tyukhtin of Sovcom, was attended by Naomi Campbell, Dasha Zhukova and friend Mario Testino, and Triumph Gallery co-owner Emelyan Zakharov (becky-sharpe, in Russian).

Kommersant newspaper will announce lay-offs today (Glossip, in Russian).

Maxim Maslakov, General Director of Art Media Group, publishers of the Open Space web resource, the forthcoming Russian edition of Art + Auction and the contemporary art journal Blacksquare, is taking readers' questions on Culture and Crisis (Lenta.ru, in Russian).

There's a rumour that the print edition of the ambitious newspaper RosBiznesKonsalting (RBK) is to close (bearshitsky, in Russian).

Two magazines, Empire (about cinema) and Car, financed by Oleg Deripaska's Forward Media Group, have closed (Open Space, in Russian):

The decision to optimise the business is connected both to problems in Oleg Deripaska's main business and also to the entrepreneur's possible divorce from his wife, Polina, who has been in charge of these projects...

Matryoshka by Giorgio Armani from the charity auction (Sovcom, in Russian) to mark ten years of Russian Vogue (Vogue, in Russian).

Russian newspapers from a century or more ago (starosti.ru).

It is claimed that the weekly political journal The New Times is haemorrhaging staff (Idiot, in Russian).

The new site BFM (IZO, earlier) has not impressed everybody (pro-kuratora, in Russian). And a move is afoot by creditors to make its owner Arkadi Gaidamak, bankrupt (izrus, in Russian).

Mikhail Khodorkovsky's punishment for giving an interview to Boris Akunin (IZO, earlier) – 12 days in solitary confinement – has been judged illegal by a Chita court (Open Space, in Russian).

The Kazakh magazine Time claims that some of President Medvedev's recent state-of-the-nation address was lifted verbatim from a speech by Kazakh defence minister Danial Akhmetov last year (Vremya, in Russian). BUT Russian bloggers say that (a) the link to the purported original speech by Akhmetov doesn't work [I would add that a search on google.kz didn't find the text either: one would have expected a cached copy if it was on a public site at some point]; and that (b) the article's purported author, Aleksei Konovalov, has no track record at all as a political commentator (marina_yudenich, in Russian). So, is the article a "cheap fake" or does a spichraiter get the sack?

Anton Nossik has opened a new business-oriented website, BFM (bfm.ru). It belongs to oligarch Arkady Gaidamak's United Media (Объединенные медиа) holding company. Looks quite useful.

Raf Shakirov, sacked in 2004 from his job as editor of Izvestiya for publishing graphic images of child victims of the Beslan siege, seems to have a new platform in the form of qn online paper (Daily Online, in Russian).

On being commissioned to write for Snob magazine (bearshitsky, in Russian).  And in the wheels-within-wheels world of Russian culture it seems par for the course that his editor, one Lena, took part in the notorious performance Fuck for the Teddy-Bear Heir (glossip, in Russian).

Hard on the heels of Snob, publisher Mikhail Prokhorov is planning to launch another magazine. Called ПроFun (= ProFun, i.e. профан, a profane person) it will be, according to differing reports, about the internet or about celebrities.

Moscow Correspondent newspaper, which under oligarch Alexander Lebedev had a short and chequered existence (it printed the claim that Vladimir Putin had married a gymnast), has closed; the "crisis" in the "mass media" is blamed by the editor (Open Space, in Russian).

How does IZO make money? So much money. About £100 a month? Well it provides "tips" to Rupert Murdoch, that's how.

Complicated lawsuit: Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov has won a lawsuit against Moscow's GQ magazine and businessman Alexander Lebedev. In an interview with GQ, Lebedev suggested that Luzhkov was behind the rumour that Vladimir Putin had married gymnast Alina Kabaeva. Lebedev himself had earlier printed this rumour in his newspaper, Moscow Correspondent, which as a result was forced to close. Luzhkov has won 50,000 roubles and a published apology from GQ (Open Space, in Russian).

I don't know when this dates from: notorious Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov wears Alexander McQueen, Ralph Lauren etc for fashion journal Icons (avmalgin, in Russian).

At last Artkhronika has gone online in a rather nifty turn-the-pages flash format (Artkhronika).

Small scandal in Kursk (kurskcity.ru, in Russian):

A group of Russian scholars took a text written in English with the help of a computer prgramme, the SCIgen generator of pseudo-scientific texts, which was devised at the Massachussets Institute of Technology. The text was translated into Russian with the help of another, Russian, computer programme and sent to the Kursk Journal of Scientific Publications by Post-graduate and Doctoral Students. After a few style corrections the journal published the article by the non-existent scholar Mikhail Zhukov with the title Stubbing Machine: an Algorithm of the Typical Unification of Points of Access and Redundancy.

The first issue of the upmarket lifestyle Snob magazine is out, retail price 500 roubles ($20); the internet portal will open soon (Open Space).

A Russian first: pop star Valeriya on the cover of Billboard magazine (Top Pop, in Russian).

Jailed oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky has received seven twelve days in a punishment cell for giving an interview (IZO, earlier) to novelist Boris Akunin (Kommersant, in Russian).

Private Correspondent (Частный корреспондент) is a new citizen journalism site developed by Ivan Zasurski and Aleksei Plutser-Sarno (Chastny Korrespondent) (via viktop, who has more on related new projects, in Russian). Give Russian intellectuals' habituation to blogging, and the degree of official control of the existing big mass-media, this project could fill a niche.

According to media magnate Anton Nossik there is widespread censorship of discussion of the financial crisis in the Russian mass media (dolboeb, in Russian).

News agency Reuters appears to have posted and then a few hours later for some reason - presumably because it was inaccurate - removed a report by Moscow correspondent James Kilner relating to the recent assassination in Moscow of Ruslan Yamadaev. In Kilner's report, Yamadaev's brother Sulim is reported to have accused "Chechnya's pro-Kremlin leader, Ramzan Kadyrov" of arranging the killing, thereby "pitching the two most powerful men in Chechnya against each other." Blogger marina_yudenich has a copy of the disappeared page (marina_yudenich, in Russian). UPDATE: from the responses to the maria_yudenich post (a) Reuters has withdrawn the article (FURTHER UPDATE: Reuters) and (b) Sulim Yamadaev intends to sue.

The entire editorial staff, except the editor, of the Russian version of lads-mag FHM, has been sacked from 1 October. This seems to be because of the complaints the staff made about the editor in a collective letter, the authenticity of which is however not confirmed. The letter includes the allegation that the editor, after a photoshoot for his Editor's Word column, enlarged his biceps and lengthened his legs in photoshop (Glossip.ru, in Russian).

A look at Mikhail Prokhorov's Snob magazine (Independent):

... a close look at both the target audience and the contents of Snob show [sic] that it doesn't promote the free-spending, bling-drenched stereotype made famous across the world by rich Russians in recent years. While celebrating personal and financial success, it does so in a rather more restrained and worldly way.

Many in Moscow claim that this is part of a move away from the lavish tackiness associated with Russia's economic boom. "The full-on extravagance, the red lipstick, the diamonds, the furs – all that is passé," Vogue's [Russian editor] Ms [Alyona] Doletskaya said in a recent interview. "The Russians are getting far more sophisticated."

Some comments from the recent meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club, where Russian and foreign intellectuals mingle with top Russian politicians including Putin and Medvedev (RIA Novosti). It seems somewhat pally to me. As far as I can tell, the only non-journalist invited from the UK was Anatole Lieven, professor at King's College, London, who is quoted about the western media:

The way the European mass media covered the conflict in Georgia was not the first case of encouraging confrontation. The Americans destroyed the free press at the beginning of the war in Iraq. The media participated in selling the lies to the American public with catastrophic results.

It's not apparent whether Prof. Lieven had anything to say about the Russian media. UPDATE: transcript of President Medvedev's meeting with Valdai Club participants (Kremlin.ru).