Victor Pinchuk, the Ukrainian billionaire, has no qualms with offending the guests of his private museum, the Pinchuk Arts Centre, in the heart of Kiev. At times he seems intent on it. A few years ago, when the museum held its annual exhibition of young artists under 35, one of the installations involved rotting trash strewn about the floor of the exhibition space, whose walls were covered with crude snapshots of naked and bedraggled women. “It smelled so bad people had to cover their faces when they got close to it,” says Pinchuk’s spokesman, Dennis Kazvan, with an impish smile.
This year’s exhibition, which opened on Friday, took another swing at the sensibilities of some of its patrons. Anatoliy Belov, a waif-like filmmaker with a brush mustache, put on a video installation called Sex, Medicamentary, Rock’n’roll, which ended with a scene of two young men making out in a forest. By the standards of the international art scene, it was fairly tame. “But it would never be allowed in Russia,” Kazvan declared. And that seemed to be the point.
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