Before going into the art business, I spent almost five years learning the wisdom of welding production at the Ural Polytechnic Institute. Accidentally learning from a friend that the Ural State University has a strong department of art history, and remembering that along with the music of The Beatles and Jimi Hendrix,I know European literature and fine arts quite well, I went to study art criticism. However, after graduating from the university, the picture was not so pleasant: art historians were not needed anywhere. There was no distribution, everyone was looking for work as best they could, but finally, I was lucky – the place of the director of exhibitions in the Sverdlovsk branch of the Union of Artists became vacant.
The artist's house on Kuibyshev Street seemed to me almost a temple. While still a student at UPI, I accidentally got to the traditional spring exhibition of the Union. I left the Artist's House then, and my impressions made me dizzy. I seemed to be in another world. And when, ten years later, I was invited to join the Union of Artists to work, I felt a certain turn of history: I was returning to the place where my serious passion for art began. The union needed a man who could take on all exhibition activities, including the duties of a loader - there was no such position in the state. The director of exhibitions had to do everything: negotiate with artists, compile expositions, print catalogs, transfer and hang paintings. I was organizing more than 30 exhibitions a year. But here, in the epicenter of the artistic life of Ekaterinburg, I got an invaluable experience for a gallerist.
In 1989, I became the head of the exhibition sector of the branch of the All-Russian Fund of Culture. I was organizing exhibitions of Moscow artists in Sverdlovsk.
In the early nineties, I headed one of the divisions of the joint Hungarian-Norwegian-German-Russian enterprise for the organization of exhibitions and began to regularly export abroad the works of Ural masters. I had to learn from my own experience the artistic preferences of Europeans, which did not always coincide with what was valued in the Russian art school.
I managed to open my first own gallery in 1998. The name came up with a simple one - "Odoevsky Art Gallery". On the one hand, since my name is in the title, then I am responsible for everything. At the same time, maybe without realizing it, I began to create a brand out of my last name. The exhibition activity itself is the best way to create the image of the gallery. If the expositions are boring, there will be no brand. For five years, I held exhibitions of almost all notable Ural artists, brought foreign authors. The stake was placed on the quality of work, the conceptuality of exhibitions and the frequent change of expositions.
But the Western system of functioning of the art business for the Ural gallery turned out to be unacceptable. In the West, the gallery acts as an intermediary who explains to the buyer how worthy of acquisition a particular work is, and gives recommendations to the artist on how to increase the commercial potential of his works. There are enough regular buyers and a large number of offers plus competent sellers, so this scheme functions normally.
In Russia, in most cases, paintings are bought spontaneously. On the other hand, we have a lot of artists who would like to sell their works, but are engaged in self-expression, and their self-expression from a commercial point of view is not interesting, and it is extremely difficult to find a buyer for such a product. We have practically no first link – buyers, the second is full of offers, but in the wrong direction. And the root of all troubles is psychology. Lenin's formula "Art belongs to the people" (and therefore to no one) took art out of the rank of business, transferring it to the section of the superstructure, which should not concern the mercantile side of life. And this has already passed into the genotype of several generations.
So the low demand in the art market is not so much an economic problem as a question of a revolution of consciousness. And I was able to deal with the problem of the revolution of consumer consciousness only in 2004, becoming a co-founder and general director of the opened Ekaterinburg Gallery of Contemporary Art. I abandoned the format of a small private gallery, which was more profitable, in favor of a "gallery - cultural project", which has a completely different structure and income scheme. The format of this gallery was just designed for the fact that there should be large good expositions. Therefore the first half of our projects were popularizing. The second half was designed for a commercial result – to cover the costs on unprofitable exhibitions.
For this purpose, an art salon, a baguette workshop, a museum expertise and a cafe were opened in the gallery.
There are more than 150 galleries in Copenhagen, about 300 in Prague, and 45,000 artists are registered in Manhattan alone in New York. And Ekaterinburg's dozen galleries are like a drop in the ocean. Together with other Ekaterinburg gallerists, we are not competitors, but colleagues. We do one thing – we want to change the psychology of our consumer.
To date, I am a specialist in exposition and exhibition activities of the Ekaterinburg Academy of Contemporary Art. One of my tasks is to prepare students for how to organize and conduct exhibitions: how to work with an artist, how to select works, how to make an exposition, hanging, labeling, how to compile and print posters and booklets, how to make PR actions. I organized several international student practices – we are assembling an exhibition with students, holding it at the academy and taking it to Europe. We have already traveled to Prague, Brussels, Copenhagen and Genoa. The second part of the practice is that I take students to museums, we study their expositions and have the opportunity to contemplate the masterpieces of the great masters live.
And in conclusion. I believe in the law of conservation of energy, but not from the point of view of physics, but of life. The more you invest, the more you are given. My age still allows me to think about some prospects. As Ecclesiastes said, there is a time to scatter stones and a time to collect stones. So, I'm still scattering stones. But the time when they will need to be collected is just around the corner.
