Kirill Ilyushchenko. Augean stables

The fate of art fairs in the Fatherland is sad. That scandal, then failure. And how otherwise, if the buyer for minimally high -quality things was not there and no. The only viable market segments are antiques and art crafts from shopping arcades in the underput to the Central House of Artists. This cave level dictates prices and taste. And stylishly dressed people walk the streets who live in new apartments with modern furniture and empty walls.

A fugitive survey of acquaintances showed: prices are not the main thing that stops the buyer. The price of normal quality of work is comparable to the price of a decent sofa or jacket. Just paintings, consistent and perennial efforts of art critics who have repeatedly about the death of painting, are withdrawn from the assortment of the correct things of a fashionable person and people are simply afraid to sit in a puddle, buying something old-fashioned.

The mentor role could be played by the art department of the 20th century in the Tretyakov Gallery if it had been able to make it a fashionable place. Art is a normal product and needs normal marketing - advertising, articles in popular magazines, where they clearly explain: why one or another artist is good, why it is fashionable and prestigious, how much it costs and where it is customary to buy.

Perhaps based on these considerations to the curators of the current art manage, they appointed Vladimir Ovcharenko, which was re-qualified as gallerymen. At first, his idea of ​​symbiosis of art and design looked good. At the exhibition, several ghosts -interiors with furniture and paintings were built, among whom were sitting and walking the semi -applied girls, depicting the housewives of the apartments (curator - editor of Mesonin magazine Natasha Barbier).

But the fascist galleryist was fatally deprived of the taste. As a result, kilometers of simple, nuclear-bowed, metaphorical, south-Russian-river, etc. are flaunted as an introduction to the main part of the exposition. painting and photographs (project "first hand"). They are united only by the fact that the majority are artists of the Ovcharenkov Gallery "Rigina" : from Oleg Golosia to Oleg Kulik . The pandan has low -format graphics of Western artists such as Gunter Ferg and Mike Kelly. As the main bait, a couple of tattooed pigs from Belgian Vim del Voy grunting in sawdust were shown. Tattoos depict Che Guevara and Stalin.

KICH, which, if desired, could be mistaken for a Camp, is replaced by no doubt by products from the Pan Dan type galleries or, say, "Harmony of contrasts". All this good takes three quarters of the manners and most of the list of participants of sixty galleries. Those few things that were not ashamed to hang on the wall and behind which should go to the fair drowned in this.