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Alexandra Bregman is a freelance art writer who has written for Air Mail, Nikkei Asia, The Wall Street Journal, Architectural Digest, and The Art Newspaper among others. She joins my co-host James Connolly on this episode to discuss her latest book, The Bouvier Affair: A True Story. The book details a high-profile art fraud case involving Dmitry Rybolovlev, a Russian oligarch, and his art advisor, Yves Bouvier.
James and Alexandra talk about the nature of consolidated wealth and power in the art world, meaning those with the money determine art and its value. The power the uber-rich have extends to many aspects of life. And this is something we see in the food landscape – the rich and powerful making decisions that trickle down to everyone.
James begins the episode by summarizing Russia’s history with food that led to the rise of the main character in Alexandra’s story, Dmitry Rybolovlev, a powerful businessman who made his money in the fertilizer industry.
From there Alexandra picks up the story and details how Rybolovlev spent his newfound riches, most notoriously on pricey works of art. One of the paintings mentioned in their discussion is a work by DaVinci called Salvator Mundi, pictured below:
Their conversation highlights the similarities between the art world which James refers to as “one of the largest, unstructured, unregulated transfers of wealth” and the current food environment. In recent years, we’ve seen the global consolidation of many food industries leading to a small portion of the population with all the money and power.
This episode is a departure from our normal topics but you are sure to find the story interesting. Listen in to learn:
- Alexandra’s background and how she became interested in art
- How sexism and racism show up in art
- How the rich buy art
- The concept of terror management
- The three things that give art a perceived value
Resources:
The Price of Everything Documentary
Masterworks art trading platform
Connect with Alexandra:
LinkedIn: Alexandra Bregman
Get the book: The Bouvier Affair: A True Story
Episode Credits:
Thank you to all who’ve made this show possible. Our hosts are Diana Rodgers and James Connelly. Our producer is Emily Soape. And of course, we are grateful for our sponsors, Patreon supporters, and listeners.
Thank you to Dry Farm Wines for their continued support of my work. Their wines are all-natural and low in alcohol which means less of a foggy feeling the next day. Plus, the non-irrigated vineyards force the roots to dig deep in search of water allowing the grapes to absorb extra minerals. Give Dry Farm Wines a try if you’ve given up on wine because of how you feel the next day or if you are simply looking for high-quality, all-natural wine. They have a great selection of sparkling, whites, rosés, and reds. And when you visit sustainabledish.com/wine you can check out their latest special offer exclusively for listeners of the Sustainable Dish podcast.
Quotes:
“I am, just as an individual, very interested in food systems. I think they hold the key to a number of problems facing the globalized world. I think the way that we eat says a lot about the way we do a lot of other things.” – Alexandra Bregman
“Terror management is centered around this notion that we’re all going to die, or we’re going to age or we’re all going to fall apart. And so what you can do is you can take a very banal product, and just charge massive premiums for it because it’s associated with this idea of terror management” – James Connolly
“I think the Instagram selfies are super ridiculous, but they are our portraiture, right? That is millennial portraiture: the labels that you tag, the locations that you go to. It’s not that different from old masterpiece paintings.” – Alexandra Bregman
Transcript:
(Intro) Diana Rodgers, RD
Welcome to the Sustainable Dish Podcast. I’m Diana Rodgers, a real food registered dietitian, author, and sustainability advocate. I co-host this podcast with James Connelly who was a producer on my film Sacred Cow. I also founded the Global Food Justice Alliance and initiative, advocating for the inclusion of animal source foods like meat, dairy, and eggs for a more nutritious, sustainable, and equitable worldwide food system. You can check it out and join me at global food justice.org. Thanks again for listening. And now onto our show.
(Ad for Dry Farm Wines) Diana Rodgers, RD
I wanted to thank Dry Farm Wines for their continued support of my work. All of their wines are all natural and low in alcohol which means less of a foggy feeling the next day. Their wines are non-irrigated so the roots have to dig deep in search of water, which means the grapes absorb extra minerals – that’s something missing from more modern vineyards. So if you are someone who has given up on wine because of how you feel the next day, but you’d still like to enjoy it on occasion, give Dry Farm Wines a try. They have a great selection of sparkling, whites, roses and reds. And when you visit sustainabledish.com/wine you can check out their latest special offer exclusively for listeners of the Sustainable Dish podcast. That’s sustainabledish.com/wine to check out Dry Farm Wines.
James Connolly
Good early afternoon to Alexandra Bregman. I’m going to give you a chance to kind of introduce yourself, talk about what you do and all that stuff. But I thought I would start out with kind of a basic introduction. So I met Alexandra through an email. I reached out to her. And I sort of wanted to talk about a number of things, sort of stories that I’ve been following for a number of years. And so I asked her to come on because primarily, our podcast is focused on agriculture, sustainable agriculture, human health, and a number of different things. And I said to Alexandra, I want to see if we can talk about the correlation between a recently discovered, quote, Leonardo da Vinci painting that had been, quote, unquote, rediscovered in New Orleans in 2004, and the relationship between that and agriculture. And so we’re kind of testing this out.
But I want to do kind of a basic understanding of the way that I have studied some of the transformations that happened in Russia that led to one of the principal characters that’s in this story. And so if you’ve been following me long enough, you’ll constantly hear me bring up a story that’s centered around Russian agriculture in the 30s. And what you have is this sort of basic principle, these dual functions of an ideology that were happening in and around that time, that was centered around a Russian scientist by the name of Vavilov, who had traveled the world, had gone all over the world, as a very young man and had collected seeds. He had recognized that the loss of biodiversity was happening on mass globally, as we sort of move towards the structure that was more akin to sort of globalization. And we’re moving into monoculture and he wanted to save as many species as we possibly could. And so with the transformation of Russia into Stalinism, and communism, a new scientist who was a student of his actually was ascendant and proceeded to go destroy a lot of Vavilov research, and then, in essence, like, persecute him and prosecute him and send him off to one of the gulags where he essentially died of starvation. So a man who was dedicated to kind of feeding the world was then marginalized. And you couldn’t even really talk about him in Russian science for a very long time. And so Trofim Lysenko became ascendant. And his ideology was based off of a weird sort of, like intermeshing, of communism to this idea of agriculture. So he would say things like species would never compete with each other. Because they were very much like the proletariat, they would share resources and always work together. And so, and he had all of these very strange ideas, he thought that he could get wheat to grow in northern climates where they weren’t… they could not grow, by introducing them to ice and to cold, and to essentially inoculate them against all of these sort of Russian winters. And he is directly responsible through many of his programs with the number of deaths that happened in the Ukraine, and in Kazakhstan, and all that stuff, I think, to this point, we have maybe 14 million deaths are attributed to his agricultural policies. But one of his main tenants was that you did not need to put in inputs in agriculture at all anymore. So he got rid of fertilizers, he got rid of pesticides, he got rid of any number of different things. And you would see propaganda like Shangoism propaganda that was popping up in around that time that would show these fields of wheat. And they would hide in these fields of wheat, these huge benches, and they would make kids walk on the top of the benches to make it look like the wheat was so dense that kids could actually just walk on the top of them. And so you see these, like, Soviet-era, photographs of wheat fields and rice fields that that showed the promise of Russian ideological agriculture that was going to feed the world and then, in essence, kind of make communism ascendant. And so you go and scan the 60s and 70s. And you start to realize that Lysenkoism, he’s essentially like, dismissed, he’s kind of thrown away. They recognize the level of destruction that this man’s ideologies, which were exported to China, which is partially responsible for the famines that happened in China. And so you see the Russian movement into agriculture that now starts to kind of try to build upon that… build upon a new structure where they would start to be able to feed themselves. And so at the height of the Cold War, Russia starts to buy massive amounts of grain from the US. They actually restructure some of American agricultural system to become a massive export commodity to bring all of this wheat into Russia, and then they start to kind of sell it off and all this. So that kind of goes into the story of the Great Grain robbery, which was, in essence, a restructuring of American agricultural systems to, in essence, sort of feed people on the other side of the iron curtain that made millions millions for commodities brokers that really became ascendant in the 70s. And so what you get is sort of, I’m going to fast forward a little bit to the fall of the Berlin Wall. And but you get to the fall of the Berlin Wall, and then you get the ascendancy of Yeltsin. And then you start to get into the restructuring of the global economy centered around these commodity crops – corn and wheat and soy and any number of different things. The commodities brokers saw the US… they saw the global move towards this as a restructuring of wealth that are centered around amassing as much money as possible on these commodities, and it starts to go into oil, it starts to get into any number of different mining, copper, aluminum, all of this other stuff. And what happens in Russia, because of economic policies that were kind of ascendant at that time, is you see, these commodity brokers kind of come into Russia, as its denationalizing a lot of its mineral mining and gasoline industries. And there are a few key players who then essentially monopolize that system. And one of them is a young guy who was a heart surgeon living in near the Ural Mountains. And I want to see if I can get some of this right, who moves into finance and then in essence, buys a large share in the potash, the fertilizer industry, which is potassium salts that are integral to growing crops globally. Russia is the second-largest exporter of potash in the world, Canada’s is first. But what you start to see is a restructuring of all of these different elements that then consolidate these industries, to the point where we now have four seed companies that in essence, kind of run everything. We have, I think, maybe four fertilizer industries that are kind of centered around nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus, global mining, corporations, all of that stuff. And it, what it does is it sort of moves into this sort of Davos man mentality, where you restructure all of that wealth towards, you know, say the 1%. And so you start to get into these Russian oligarchs that are, in essence, extracting enormous amount of extreme wealth that was held in Russia, and its mineral and mining rights. And they start to play on the sort of global stage of that. And it starts to play into multiple things. And so I found this relationship between the art world, which is one of the largest, unstructured, unregulated transfers of wealth in many different ways, industries in the world, the art market, and with the methods and materials that we use to sort of feed ourselves. And as globalization sort of became really ascendant in the 90s, into the early 2000s, we start to see a real strain on that system. And so I reached out to Alexandra, because she kind of tells some of the story from the art world perspective, in a brilliant book called The Bouvier Affair: A True Story, where she goes into one of the stories of this potash billionaire, who sold a massive stake in his mineral mining operations, exported that wealth, to say Switzerland and to a number of different places all over the world. And I was hoping she would kind of come on in like, tell the story of this individual. And so let you go with that. So I’m wondering if we could start just a little bit of like a bio, what you do, and then we’ll kind of dive into the story, and I’ll kind of flesh it out as we go.
Alexandra Bregman
Wow, I learned so much just now; I actually learned a lot. And it is amazing to see how this art story, this very high-profile art story, has so many different diversions or kind of flags that different kinds of people find interesting. When I was researching the prominent Russian figure in the story, Dmitry Rybolovlev, it’s was a very different crowd that was interested in the Russian side of things, versus the art side of things, versus the Swiss side of things. It’s very rare that someone wants all the pieces of this puzzle. So, definitely, thank you for reaching out, and I’m really looking to hopefully be able to contribute to this very exciting podcast.
I mean, as I mentioned, I am just, as an individual, very interested in food systems, and I think they hold the key to a number of problems facing the globalized world. I think the way that we eat says a lot about the way we do a lot of other things. So, it’s an honor to be able to do that. But in my work, I have been predominantly focused on arts and culture, and more recently, investigations.
So, I began my career in art galleries and auction houses as like, the intern in the world, the girl at the front desk. And I was just pathologically curious always, and ended up getting my master’s in journalism. When I was working in journalism, I married back in the art world, and a lot of these questions that people have about the “wild and wooly art world” as Kelly Crow calls it, or the peeking behind the curtain of potential money laundering and tax fraud. All of those questions can, I guess, be answered. I mean, if you know enough about how art is bought and sold, it can also tell you that the people who are at the core of some of these high-level transactions don’t exactly think of themselves as money launderers and globalized traffickers, you know, they’re just… it’s a lifestyle, it’s an asset that they have in their portfolios. And, yeah, I love to talk about it, and I hope to remain as objective as possible. If I put my foot in my mouth, you know, I’m sorry. I’m just an art writer, and I’m just curious like everybody else.
But yes, I wrote this book, and I went on a great adventure, pre-COVID, that allowed me to kind of bop around the world. I went to Singapore and Monaco and Geneva to trace the story, but I did not go to Perm, Russia, where Rybolovlev is from. I stayed away from Russia for a variety of reasons, mostly, because if you’re a super-rich Russian person in the story, you know, why be there when you can be on your beautiful island somewhere else? But I did not go to Scorpios, which Dmitry Rybolovlev owns. It’s off the coast of Cyprus, and I keep joking that one day, they’ll have to let me go.
James Connolly
So yeah, I want to kind of approach it from two different perspectives. And if we could tell the story of the Robert Simon, Leonardo da Vinci painting, the sort of rediscovery of that, and how it reaches this sort of crescendo of energy around it, but I kind of want Rybololev’s story is sort of centered around, in essence, what I would describe is kind of the wild wild west of what was happening in the 90s, in the early aughts in Russia. And so you get somebody who is able through… they were, I think, two main ways to buy into the commodity and the degree of wealth that was generated in Russia at the time, as it was moving away from communism and state-owned supplies of things, and moving into sort of privatized world. And so you could essentially buy loans and shares in a company, or you could do with what Dmitry had done – I’m just going to call him Dmitry.
Alexandra Bregman
Yeah. That’s probably easier.
James Connolly
And in essence sort of buy shares in people who were workers in these companies, and so the Uralkali was a monopoly in Russia. It was the potash mining company that owned most of the mining and mineral resources that were derived from that. And so he ends up becoming a stakeholder in that, and the level to which that’s sort of the wild, wild west aspect of it at the time, it kind of gets into, there were a number of like assassination attempts against him, there were accusations and a number of different things that kind of happened, that had in essence sort of forced him to sell out. And his family, in essence, kind of move to Geneva, Switzerland to kind of get away from all of the dangers that were kind of happening at the time. And so Dmitry ends up spending a year in jail, is accused of murdering one of the people who had taken over the company. It’s been a year in jail, sort of waiting. I think his charges were dismissed. And then he goes over to Geneva. And can we talk a little bit about like, they only really, really speak Russian at the time. They end up in Geneva, Switzerland. They kind of want to pull into this world. They’re newly minted billionaires, and they want to, in essence, sort of like live among the rich and the people at the time. And so can you talk a little bit about like, what happens there because I find it really intriguing.
Alexandria Bregman
Okay, what happens in Geneva. So, I will gloss over the other things.
I would like to say just a couple of things:
One is ‘the Wild West’. I hear that verbatim phrase every single time when people talk about Russia in that era. I don’t know if it’s in textbooks, or if it’s in CIA files or what but Wild West is always the description. So definitely, check on that; check plus.
As far as the complexities of being a member of the Board of Uralkalii, I definitely recommend reading about it. I read through a number of articles that were, at the time, present, and I even was like translating Russian articles about this murder that occurred. So Rybolovlev (or Dmitry) was accused of that of ordering the hit. He wasn’t the one who fired the gun, but he potentially told the person to go, and he ended up getting out of jail for that accusation, and yes, fleeing to Geneva right away. At that time, they were still as a family vested. They had their shares of Uralkali. They were shareholders. And, in fact, the Russian representatives that I spoke with, they said that the fact that the shares were in question during the prison term was one of the negotiations, one of the reasons that, if Rybolovlev went to prison, then he could get his shares. So, there’s a lot of, like, I want to say Machiavellian, but really just high-stakes games played. Like, would you go to a Russian prison for a million dollars or a billion dollars? These are the questions you’re faced with in post-Cold War Russia. But yes, I mean, coming out of that, Elena Rybolovleva, Dmitry’s wife, was in Geneva, I believe, before he got out of jail. I’ve not—it’s been a while since I looked at it, but I’m pretty sure. She was single; her husband was in prison. She didn’t speak any French; they just went to Geneva because it was safe. But like anyone who moves to any new city, you have to fit in at some point. You have to start talking to people.
Her big coup de grâce, her big win, was she went to the dentist. The dentist said, ‘Oh, you speak mostly Russian, my wife speaks Russian! You should talk to her.’ And that person became her closest confidant and her friend for many years. I think they’ve had ups and downs, but they’ve been close for a very long time, because of that just chance interaction at the dentist. So, for the most part, this was all pretty normal in the sense of, like, just walking around a new place trying to get adjusted, but how normal can it be if your husband’s an oligarch?
And there’s this, like, you know, it’s French and right? It’s very aristocratic. It’s very, it’s very exciting, but she just went to the dentist. So yes, to that end, the question of: how do you fit in in a new place? And what do you want to do with your wealth? And what are the safest places for that wealth? Those things all kind of took shape as time went by.
And so Elena Rybolovleva’s good friend was Tania Rappo, and like I said, they were relatively normal people. I mean, she was a very brilliant woman, and she is a very brilliant woman. But she didn’t know that much about billion-dollar art transactions. It was only when Elena said to her, ‘Hey, like, where do I go for painting?’ That she started helping her out and looking into it—partly, I think out of curiosity herself. But you know, this is something that I focused on in my book that, as of yet, the narratives on what happened at this high-level transaction have not done, which is recognize that this is as much a woman’s story as it is man story. I think the wives talking is kind of a dismissed thing. But that is how the art story started, and that is very much how the fallout also started later on.
In any case, flashing forward to the Salvator Mundi, the Leonardo da Vinci Savior of the World painting, to answer your question, that came later. This early period of Geneva was just the beginning. They had no art. The story is that one of the reasons they wanted to have art is because the light fixtures in the new house were designed to have art. So they were like, well, we should put something there. We should put something good. That was literally it. It wasn’t even like connoisseurship. It was like well, the house needs it and we’re just we’re settling in, so let’s buy a painting, and we have money, so it can be a Monet painting. Like it was just that easy. And actually, in art galleries, I can attest, it is often that easy, right? Somebody comes in in a nice outfit with their family and says, ‘Will this match the sofa? Okay. A million dollars, here you go. Boom, boom, boom. Now we’re art collectors.’
So the Salvator Mundi came much later. And I don’t think that it could have been so important to the story if it hadn’t been one of the later acquisitions. The fact that this family had built a collection that is truly unbelievable when you think about private collections—you don’t often know what happens in those secondary markets behind closed doors in a mansion, but to think that 30-something masterpiece works that would be the crown jewel of any museum are just sitting in this person’s collection, not even on display, just things that he happens to own—and the Salvator Mundi was one of the last pieces of that puzzle. It came to represent machinations of power on a global scale. One of the things that I am particularly interested in about the Salvator Mundi is that the subject itself is power. I always say this, because it’s very important. Looking at it, why would you buy this? Why would this representative image speak to you? Savior of the world; king of kings, ruler of rulers, godlike power; masculine energy, right? It’s just man, power, running the world. And that was the perfect vehicle to express this business-minded intensity. But that was not the beginning. That was the end.
James Connolly
Right. Yeah. And I think that that is, as you’re following the storyline in your book, will you start to recognize that there is, I mean I don’t even want to call it pressure, because it’s like, you know, you experienced pressure in very different ways. But you had these newly minted billionaires, who then try to fit into high society. And the only way that they would be able to do that is that you buy more and more toys. You invest in the art world, you don’t necessarily know what to buy, you don’t even know who to buy it from, you don’t even know where to begin, you have to own… Dmitry ends up owning a football club. He’s following a lot of Russian oligarchs, you own islands you own mansions in New York. You’re investing in projects that either give you power, right, he buys Trump’s residence down in Florida, or you buy in or invest in places that also give you access and, you know, access to any other different prospects. But art is one of those things that is sort of a playground of the super-rich, and the worst thing you can do is buy an art, or invest in artists that isn’t part of these blue chips. And if you’re following in the 90s, you start to see, there are a number of larger cases that kind of go into the sort of interplay between these newly minted, you know, non-generational wealth, people who want to play in high society. And then what I would say is semi-predatory art dealers, and all this other stuff, we were getting them to buy into these massive collections associated with it. You start to get into price-fixing them on some of the major auction houses, collusion among them, you start to see, a lot of blue-chip galleries are reselling works, and telling the seller or the buyer, that there’s a disparate relationship between the sale price, and then the price that was bought at. And so you start to get into these people who are at play in this who kind of give this air of knowledge and academia and, you know, generational sort of like high society elements to it. And Switzerland becomes one of the epicenters of that. You have Freeport. And you start to get into the sort of Bouvier aspect of that story. So let’s talk about Bouvier.
Alexandra Bregman
All right. Well, just a quick caveat. I don’t think that the worst thing you can do is buy art that’s not part of the blue-chip. Sometimes you can get lucky. Sometimes you can say, ‘this artwork speaks to me’. And then because you have a number of influential friends, that artist can generate influence very quickly. That does happen in the contemporary space, not not-often. You’re like, some random person making art in a warehouse who gets picked up by a rich person, who passes it to another rich person, and before you know it, they’ve got solo shows and retrospectives and all kinds of shebangs happening just because they got lucky in the right person pick them. So that does happen in the reverse as well.
And also, there are plenty of very rich people who have terrible taste. They just buy whatever they want, and they have a crazy-looking house, and it’s fine. There’s no crime associated with that. But yes, if you are trying to fit in with a certain set, and you want to show that you are a person of taste, then yes, you should buy the right stuff, and in the case of Dmitry and Elena and Tania Rappo, Bouvier was the person that had the right stuff.
I believe he had a chance meeting with the couple and their friend at the free port, the Ports Francs, which is a warehouse network that allows people to store their artworks at a tax benefit and with significant privacy. Because Bouvier owned a part of the free port, he oversaw the largest warehouse within the Ports Francs system. So in Geneva, there is a national association—the Geneva Freeport, it’s owned by Geneva. It’s a Swiss institution, and it’s approved in that way. It’s the people that work within it that have varying degrees of power, and Bouvier had some of the most power in that Geneva system.
So, he met this, like, clueless Russian person, and was like, ‘Oh, this is a potential boom.’ You know, Bouvier has an incredible eye because he is a very astute businessman for emerging markets and potential buyers, and he’s also a very good read of people. I mean, he’s like a poker player as he says in the film; he asked his poker friend to help him out on something. I mean, it is an art and it is a game. And he sized these people up and he says to Tania, ‘Hey, can you give them my number? Like, I want to help them out. Let me meet them, let me give them the art that they need, and I’ll also reward you for it.’
And she said, ‘Okay, you know, of course!’ She’s happy to make connections for people. She still does it. I mean, it doesn’t have to be at this high level. She’s the kind of person you meet at a dinner party. And she says, ‘Oh, I know the perfect person for you to meet. If you meet x, I have y, you know, let’s make a match.’ That’s just the kind of person she was. That’s how she even met Elena in the first place.
Flash forward, Bouvier’s sitting down with Rybolovlev, he’s telling him what he has. And before you know it, you’re spending millions, hundreds of millions on art.
Now, to call that predatory, certainly, that is a narrative of Dmitry’s camp during the ensuing lawsuit that happened about the difference between the buyer’s price and the sell price. However, what Bouvier says on the other side is, ‘That’s any market. You don’t know the difference of anything that you buy. Any goods and services have that differential.’
Think about, for example, if we’re talking about food systems. I’ve been really interested lately in the superfood propaganda machine where we think that we need to eat Ecuadorian quinoa to be stronger than if we just ate the local wheat germ that was fermented in our own guts and got—whatever. Anyway, the Ecuadorian quinoa—or, sorry, is it Ecuador or El Salvador, maybe you know?
James Connolly
I don’t necessarily know.
Alexandra Bregman
OK, so I’m probably totally wrong; this is not my expertise. But I did learn something about—it’s one of those two countries, Ecuador or El Salvador, where they’re sending grains (and I believe it’s quinoa) to Europe. And the markup in Europe for this grain, that was eaten by local people for centuries, is astronomical. But it doesn’t matter. Because to the buyer and the consumer of this foreign exotic grain that’s going to make you stronger and healthier and more impervious to illness than anyone else, you will pay that premium, and you can afford that.
Flashing back to Dimitry versus Yves Bouvier, you’re saying, ‘Okay, well, he could afford it. I mean, I didn’t rip him off. He’s fine. It’s a price he was willing to pay. Why should I, Bouvier, be held accountable for his decisions?’
And another thing that happened that’s also culturally interesting and speaks to what you’re talking to about the Russian background is the cultural differences and the way that Russians do business. So, if you’re talking about the potash industry and all the different people that were involved in making that happen, Dmitry was a member of the board. There were multiple people on the board; there was strategy involved in that; and it was a sense of trust, and a like, ‘don’t mess with me ’cuz I’ll kill you’ kind of vibe. So, that’s like where he worked. There’s an expectation that when Dmitry processes a work of art through his family office, based out of Monaco to send the work to Singapore or to Cyprus, even though he’s living in Geneva, and maybe he saw the work in Geneva, but maybe he saw it in Paris, maybe he took the jet somewhere else, you know, there’s this network, that the person that approves it is not the same person that sends the email that clears it, that’s not the same person that picks it up, because you’ve got people for that.
Like, I actually know an art collector now who’s extremely passionate about a work of art, and I’m like, ‘You need to sit back. If you go around telling everybody how much you love this painting, you’re not going to look like these other rich guys. These rich guys really care about how my people move will call your people and then we’ll do lunch.’ But that level of bureaucracy was the kiss of death in this network of—in the relationship between Bouvier and Dmitry Rybolovlev, because they never just sat down, talked to each other, and figured it out together. There were so many systems in place, including language barrier.
So, back to the fact that Elena didn’t speak French when she got to Geneva. She learned it. She settled in, she’s been living in Switzerland since then. She doesn’t comment on the story; I suspect she signed something that silenced her because of the ensuing divorce proceedings, but that comes later.
Dmitry, according to everyone involved, doesn’t speak English or French at all—not a lick, allegedly. He’s also heavily protected where it’s nearly impossible to sit down and talk to him. I can think of maybe three people who’ve done it in 10 years of research and reporting on this story. So he wasn’t the kind of guy who could just say, ‘How much is this really worth?’ That would never come up. And when you ask somebody at the Monaco office what happened, they just shrug their shoulders. Maybe people were on yachts; maybe people were doing God knows what. But the bottom line is, they weren’t paying attention. And they didn’t think they needed to. Nobody messes with Russian oligarchs; you wouldn’t have to do that normally.
So, like you’re saying, you know, this art market is a little bit more precarious than that. You have to be very eyes-open and very, not distrustful, but aware of what’s going on in your art collection. Because there is a lot of room for things to be shifted, or one regulation or one price difference away from many millions of dollars.
I think now, especially in lieu of this case, there is an increasing eye on art transactions. The government papers, they don’t get it. They don’t understand the lifestyle component. I think they’re only looking for the crime, and they’re only looking at it assuming that that’s all that was involved. But there are so many loyalties and changing perceptions, and it’s a long road before you get to the hammer and the gavel.
James Connolly
It’s interesting, to go back to the sort of the quinoa aspects of that world. It’s interesting kind of, there’s a term in marketing called terror management. Terror management is centered around this notion that we’re all going to die, or we’re going to age or we’re all going to kind of fall apart. And so what you can do is you can take a very banal product, and just charge in massive premiums for it, because it’s associated with this idea of terror management. So like, I remember walking in Soho, at a sort of wellness clinic. And there was a huge bottle of I think it was citric acid, it was, in essence, it was citric acid and a little bit of cayenne, and it was $50. Right, and it was supposed to be this detox cleanse, you take a scoop of it, you add some water, maybe a little bit of fresh lemon juice, and somebody could actually charge $50, for something that would, in essence, cost about three cents. I find that in the art world as well, it’s like, you know, because of the going into The Lost Leonardo, the Leonardo documentary that kind of goes and follows this story, there is a notion that you’re kind of missing out, like, you want to be part of this whole other system. You want to own this, right, this is the first Leonardo da Vinci that’s been on sale or on the market for, you know, forever. And there are I think it’s mentioned that there’s 15, Leonardo da Vinci’s in the world, you know, and so you want the… this is, this is a genuine need. And so the frenzy is kind of created.
Alexandra Bregman
There were three things that you address just now when talking about why an artist felt artwork is valuable, that really spoke to me. The first is FOMO, right? It’s funny that you say that too, because I, as an art writer, I write about all kinds of things, I’m really interested in the NFT, boom, for example. I was one of the first people to write about the Beeple sale, I got my editor to publish it at Air Mail before this sale actually occurred. So I was like, ‘I think this is going to be worth a lot of money, I think we should cover this, this is going to change the world’. And she was like, ‘Okay,’ hit publish, and then like two weeks later, everyone was talking about NFTs. And the people that talk about NFTs are the same people that talk about the Salvator Mundi. It’s like they all want to be in the cool kid club, and they all want to be a part of the big money that’s happening in the arts. It’s the same people that buy it, same people that report, it became like the same kids at the cafeteria. And it’s funny to me that I am now, like, at that lunch table, because I just, I guess I want to know what’s happening and stay ahead of the curve.
When it comes to the collector mindset, that’s definitely a factor too. It’s like, ‘Well, all my friends on Madison Avenue’ (this is something that comes up in the film, The Price of Everything, the documentary)—like, ‘All my friends on Madison Avenue have these three artworks or these three artists; I need them. I’m going to go to Sotheby’s and I’m going to get me this same collection,’ the same way people get a status handbag or the same way they Instagram their avocado toast, you know, like trends are trends, and FOMO is FOMO, and the art world does capitalize on that often.
The other thing that you mentioned was scarcity. The scarcity mindset, I think, is definitely a huge factor in valuing art as an asset class. As you said, with food too, I think that citric acid and stuff, it’s easy if it’s just down the street, but what happens when food deserts are for the poor and the bounty of avocados are for the rich? You know, that kind of creates that luxury mindset. And how problematic that is in food is also somewhat problematic in culture on a broader scale. It’s like, why can only these people afford this? Because the luxury scale of, ‘well, this is of value, therefore, it’s pricing me out.’ You know, there’s a lot of discourse on that.
I think the auction specialists do it really well. Amy Cappellazzo is the Sotheby’s, Christie’s titan; she’s now doing her own thing with Asia. She talks about that a lot. It’s like, it has to be valuable; it has to be very expensive. Simon de Pury, as well, from Phillips de Pury who’s also eponymous now. Like, if it’s not expensive, then why do you care?
That’s also something that’s super interesting with antiquities, because right now, the antiquities market is extremely taboo. It’s considered horrible to own something that could be a spoil of war, in tandem with Holocaust restitution, you know. If you have a fragment from Iraq, it’s considered like having an animal head above your dining table, like, it’s not really a cool thing to do anymore. But what happens to the value of that work if it’s not acceptable to have it? Then it depreciates it. So something that should be, you know, in a museum or a treasure, if there’s no market for it, does that change its cultural value when the financial value is modified? So, just an interesting economic dialogue.
When it comes to Da Vinci—Leonardo, right? If you’re a true Leonardo person, you say it by his first name, but I am just a regular girl, and I say Da Vinci every time because I’m just middle class. But yeah, I mean, there is only a finite number of words for a variety of reasons, and that absolutely, 100%, locks in the value. Many of these masterpieces—a masterpiece is by definition, a scarce work, because they can’t be reproduced, the guy’s not alive anymore, it has to be just a few things.
Picasso and Warhol are a little bit anomalies in that sense, because there was such a large number of works, but they’re gone now, so it’s still done. And it will be interesting to see the Old Masters of the 14th, 15th century, if they’re valued at a premium, because there are so few works, how will that impact the 21st century masters? Will they depreciate in the next decade or two, because people are not trading them at the same rate, and because there’s such a large number of them? So that’s definitely something that art economists talk about when they do determine the value of something, is the scarcity component.
And the last thing you and I were talking about, that I love, is the mortality, right? So this elixir, this ginger shot, will keep you alive. So too, will art, the timelessness of your collection. Whether that’s putting it on a building name, you know, ‘This is my, I own all these works, come to this museum, that’s my legacy’. Certainly, if you go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, that is a driver for people; they want to put their name on the building. But there’s also the immortality of your financial assets. If you can—the same way people sink money into properties because they know that the property value will always go up, the art value will always go up as well. So if you’re saying, ‘I know this, Modigliani it’s timeless; I’m going to pay 200 million for it; I’m protecting my 200 million from the Russian government, from my crazy Aunt Ida who wants to steal my money, and at the end of the day, like, when I resell this in 10 years, or 20 years, or my great-great-grandchildren need money, it will be so astronomically priced that I will be set for life.’
Speaking of the Salvator Mundi in this sense, the 450 million that it ended up selling for is absolutely jaw dropping. It is the most expensive any work has ever been sold for. But at the end of the day, it’s not what it could have been sold for when you think about the insurance valuations of the Mona Lisa. When you do all these calculations, how you determine the value of a work of art is all of these factors. And ultimately, if you have it, and you want to do it, then, you know, Saudi princes go forth.
So all of that is just background to some degree, but it does inform the answer. How did a work of art that was in a Louisiana home completely forgotten about, overpainted, a wooden panel that actually when the restoration was done had a big crack in it—I mean, it was damaged and destroyed, and not a lot of people would have seen it. And that’s also an interesting question is like, if you see a masterpiece in an auction catalog, would you know, right? Do you have that eye? And these three art dealers in New York did, but they didn’t even really know. They’re like, ‘Oh, this could be interesting. Let’s pick it up. It’s cheap. We’ll see what happens.’ They didn’t say, ‘Oh my god, this is a Leonardo da Vinci painting in this auction catalog in the South. Let’s snatch it up.’ They said, ‘could be something. I’m noticing that it is definitely from the 15th century. So, I’ll check it out.’
What do they do? They take it to the experts. They take it to the Diane Modestinis of the world, the conservators, the appraisers. And they realized ‘hey, our instinct on this could be good.’ Now it wasn’t a smooth sail. And I guess both, S-A-I-L or S-A-L-E. Thomas Campbell, who was at the Metropolitan Museum at that time, later posted a picture of the before of the painting. And said, ‘Are you sure, guys? Are you sure? Look at this. This does not seem like a multimillion-dollar work’. It was very rude of him to do that because it came from his own institution, first of all, so I just can’t get over that. I’m not here to destroy Dianne Modestini’s career. Like, I don’t know why you would do that to your top conservator at your own institution. I think that that’s crazy. And to speak about that feminist component for, again, lack of a better term, feminists, just like, speaking about women who live in the world. I think that if this had been a male conservator that they would not have vilified her the way that they did. I think it was absolutely an attack on a woman’s work, because there’s no attack on the dealers or anything. It’s only the conservation. You know, that’s problematic to me. If you’re going to attack this journey, attack it from the beginning. Attack it from the auction house. Attack it from the dealer. Attack it from everything. No, they only talk about the changes and modifications made to the work.
James Connolly
Well, Can we just pause there for a second? The thing that I found sort of interesting, and part of the reason why I feel like people could be critical of it. Having rewatched it again this morning, is the degree of transformation that takes place on film when you’re watching the documentary.
Alexandra Bregman
Yeah, no, that’s exactly what I was gonna say. That the conservation efforts from the research I’ve done as a non-Leonardo specialist, they check out, they’re pretty standard. It’s not overpainting, it is a removal of years. It is a pinpoint system. But that becomes almost a forensic question, really. And I think what’s interesting if you jump back, right, of these three dealers, who said, ‘Oh, this artwork is from that period. We can tell that it’s from that period’. That’s all you need to know, often enough. When they’re doing dating for authentication, they date the paints; they date the panel; they paint the wood; that is it, and the rest of it is subjective and always will be.
James Connolly
What I find kind of interesting is Dmitry’s evolution as an art collector as he becomes more and more ingratiated with the idea that he isn’t beholden to traditional marriage or his wife anymore. And then he starts to buy into more erotic paintings.
Alexandra Bregman
Yeah! Right? Nobody ever talks about that journey. I hope they do now. Wow, so OK, I love everything that you’re saying. I think we’re really going like, deep into time, because I just want to respond to everything that you say. But, to answer your question, Dmitry’s evolution, I’m so glad to talk about it in that way, because that was directly my intention as well, in the way that I wrote the book. I wanted to show his inadvertent transformation. The narrative that the Russian side projects to the world is, ‘I’m just this guy who came in, didn’t know anything, and I got ripped off big time’. But it’s more complicated than that. It’s about two men who grew into each other in this working relationship, where Bouvier, yes, effectively, I don’t want to say “extort” because that’s an inflammatory and defamatory word and I have no intention of defaming Yves Bouvier today, but took larger and larger sums as the works got higher as the deal-making got better, you know, he was becoming a king. And you know, they call him the free port king? They call Dmitry the potash czar. These were titans, and they were doing their thing, and with each passing year, they became better at it. So Bouvier got better and better making money off Dmitry. Dmitry got better and better spending his own money. Whether that’s on, you know, as you said, the toys. The boys’ toys: the yachts, the girls, the sports teams, and they were all strategic. You know, he wasn’t just throwing money down the drain; everything had a purpose, that Machiavellian concept, and the thing that really earned him respect in the Russian communities. Dmitry’s, no dummy, right? Nobody says like, ‘Oh, he’s a really nice guy,’ or like, ‘Oh, he’s like, really handsome, and he’s like, great to talk to.’ Like, no, that’s not the value. The value is, you don’t mess with this guy; he knows what he’s doing. Whereas Bouvier was the other side of that. It was like, ‘Oh, you know, this is the cool guy at the party’. This is the guy that you want to help you. And I can attest, right? Speaking to Rybolovlev is extremely difficult to do and requires a lot of loyalty and just being a part of that world, just being around the right people. And Bouvier’ll talk to anybody. You know, he comes out with a little polar fleece. He sits down with you. He’s lovely. Very open. So yes, so I think those two were a bad match, but also a perfect match, because the more Dmitry wanted to assert himself in this lifestyle, the more willing Bouvier was. But one thing you said where you were talking about the big whales. Can we nerd out for a second and talk about whales in sustainable food ecosystems? Because I feel like there’s a link there, and I want to make that point.
James Connolly
Sure, go for it.
Alexandra Bregman
So what happens when you overfish oceans? The whales have nothing to eat, right? And there’s this idea that you only need a few whales, and like the whales are not the priority, the kelp is the priority. You know, you want to just get that salmon. And if you lose a few kelp along the way, like, it’s fine. But it’s not fine, because as you move up the chain, the whales are messed up, and as you move down the chain, that affects ocean temperatures, that does all kinds of terrible things to humanity. And I think that the few whales in the art market can function similarly. Again, you know, we’re living in an era that has a lot to do with the medieval era of patronage. There are often a few whales, a few sharks, making the moves that dictate the tastes making for the rest of the world. But it also has a financial ripple effect where you’ll never be one of those whales, and if there are only a few of them, the ocean will overheat. If only a few people have a chance to make that dent, to make that ripple in the water, then the water will be forever altered in a negative way. You know, if we’re talking about proletariat art, the idea that the most beautiful works of art will never be seen, ultimately, completely, radically alters their value. Like if I had never seen or you had never seen the Mona Lisa, then the Salvator Mundi would not be worth anything. It has to have that fluidity with the average person to be able to enjoy and react to art on a day-to-day basis. And my hope is that, you know, yes, patronage and marketing have these great ways of opening the floodgates and allowing people to have these kinds of dialogues like you and me, but until we really continue to see and appreciate art, then it will not sustain.
And here’s another knock. I’m very interested in Masterworks, the stock trading art platform. I wrote an article about this as well. It’s all fun and games until you never see the art. They’re talking about partial share investment and trading artists’ stock. Okay, but where’s the painting? Right? Why do I care about this painting? Don’t solely show me the chart that other people have bought it. That the whales like it. The whales don’t have any kelp! You know, we’re the kelp! You know what I’m saying? Oh, there is an imbalance in that world that is fun now. But I think what’s happening in the NFT space and in the Black Art movement as well, is a real rupture and a real disconnect from that cool kids club, because at some point art has to speak for itself.
James Connolly
Yeah, I mean, I guess, I don’t know, like, I worry about that. I worry about the idea that inclusion into a space, let’s just talk about, say Kehinde Wiley or a lot of the Nigerian artists that are becoming ascendant, who are building enormous reputations for the work that they’re producing, the only way that we can actually move towards more equity is to do that is to, in essence, force people into a system where now like, only a few Black artists and white artists. And so like we’ve diversified a system that I think is inherently kind of toxic to begin with. I really like Da Vinci. I like Michelangelo’s work. Do I consider them better than a lot of artists that I’ve seen who are working today? I don’t necessarily think so. You know, I think… Look, so much of this, so much of this is borne out, I’ll try to explain it in the way that I explained it to other artists, nowadays. The commodification of these master artists, the way that we have marketed and change the world to, in essence, sort of create this display of what art is, is a legacy of what was considered what is colonialism. Right? So if you walk through the Louvre, if you walk through the Vatican, all I see now is just the hundreds and millions and millions of deaths that were like provided so you can have gold leaf here and you know, attribution to God over here. What you don’t see is the arguments over whether or not people in the Caribbean actually had souls and so therefore couldn’t be exploited. Right. And so the movement towards repatriation of art that was stolen as a legacy of colonialism is a good first step. More inclusion of artists who were very critical of the legacy of that artwork, Kehinde Wiley does that I think really well, right? So take normal people that you would see on the street, gather them together, put them on horses, make them ride like kings, put all of these accouterments of like Emperor’s and Napoleon and all of this stuff, but what he’s saying is, how ridiculous was this art to begin with? Right? The annunciation of these leaders who sent millions of people to death over stupid fights, like fights over family. Like that’s World War One was fights over brothers and cousins who didn’t get along anymore. So to me, art is it’s really hard to kind of like unwrap all of that stuff and then say, oh Da Vinci exists because of what? Because of what? Like because he created flying machines or the notion of flying machines. It was a multidisciplinary artists who then existed all… I don’t necessarily buy it. I don’t buy it anymore.
Alexandra Bregman
Omigod. I don’t agree with everything that you said. I do think that the discourse on colonialism versus like 21st-century Black Art is extremely important and definitely a major disrupter. I don’t think that negates the value of Leonardo da Vinci. I don’t think that negates the value of the collection that this person amassed. But I do think yes, the trappings of wealth and the complexities of capitalism definitely have their problematic issues. I mean, like you said, you know, defining better, I think, is the question. How do you define better? But I don’t, again, I wouldn’t say like, Da Vinci is worthless because Kehinde Wiley made an important point about society. I don’t think those things have to be mutually exclusive. You know, I am part of this world, and I do value it. I just am also conscious of what the future has in store. And ultimately, you know, if you kind of circle back to the economic personas, the economic behaviors that come into any kind of acquisition, it’s human nature. I think, right now, this woke culture is a very pivotal moment and a seismic shift and an important one, but that too, has its downside. Saying everything in the museum is a product of colonialism, and every antiquity has to be sent away, and we shouldn’t have any Egyptian artifacts, yes, there are important arguments to be made there, but that is a blowback as well, and that becomes those few whales. The tastemakers decide. The tastemakers throw away your art collection, you know, totally trample on it. I mean, that’s kind of a controversial opinion as well. But history is history. The reason we read Shakespeare today is because there’s always a new perspective on it; you can look at it under a racial lens, or a gendered lens, or whatever it may be—a socioeconomic lens, a veganist lens, I don’t know. But it’s different today because we have different eyes on it. I think that that can also hold true for different kinds of art and different art forms throughout history.
So, I guess I think it is important to hold the microscope and hold people accountable for the art historical movements of past, but I don’t think it devalues them to the point that they are not still worth discussing and studying. I often wonder about this now, like, our wealth status symbols. What in our 21st-century world dictates to others that we have a lot of money that will be seen as garish and ridiculous in the future? Or conversely, be exploited as an eternal symbol of wealth? I think the Instagram selfies are super ridiculous, but they are our portraiture, right? That is millennial portraiture, the labels that you tag, the locations that you go to. It’s not that different from old masterpiece paintings in, you know, the Netherlands, where you had your dog, and you had your glass, and mirror, and you know, you put all your fancy things in the picture to show everybody that you’re fancy, that’s the timeless interest.
Another artist I wanted to bring up was Modigliani, who’s also in the collection of Rybolovlev. He was absolutely destitute; he was just scraping by; yet he was also acutely aware from an early age of how to navigate creditors and dodge bullets. When he was born (this is a little tidbit in the book) his family was trying to escape creditors. And there was a loophole that if you had your belongings on your bed, they couldn’t take them. So they could seize everything but what was on the bed. So the family knew that the creditors were coming and they put everything they owned on the bed, and that’s how he was born. So, you know, credit manipulation is not unique to the 21st century. But like, you know, yeah, again, at the end of the day, rich people are going to do what rich people are going to do. The reason that art is so high value is because it’s just another asset in the portfolio.
James Connolly
Yeah, I mean, I think if, if anything that I’ve done, maybe we can kind of finish up with this, but I was talking to a friend the other day, and I was like, you know, I think one of the stranger things about me is that I see all this stuff, and I still get pissed off. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. So when I look at all this stuff, what I’m looking at is a restructuring of entire, like the global economy centered around its sustainability, right? We’re telling people what they can and cannot have and what they can have in the future. And the people who are determining this are world leaders, some of the worst that I’ve seen in multiple generations, I think. People who’ve been put in power people who have shoved themselves into power because of wealth and privilege and any number of different things. And so what we’re telling people is that the normal consumer has to do away with this, that whatever, because we spent our carbon budget on all of these different things over the years. And so this whole sustainability matrix, this whole greening of the economy, every single thing that has happened, you know, since the early 2000s, has, in essence, ushered in an economic system that has made enormous amount of wealth for a very few people. And the pressure on the consumer, the individual people who have seen their wages stagnant, their generational wealth lost because of games that are played in the mortgage banking crisis in any number of different speculative endeavors and stuff like that, the push on that for people to functionally change the way that they do. Meanwhile, this one person does nothing, they buy private jets, they buy private islands they buy, you know, they hide their wealth, all of their taxable income, Pandora papers, any number of different things associated with that. It’s actually considered embarrassing for these people to pay taxes. And so what has happened is a functional shift towards that these are the people who are telling us that we have to shift everything and eat, you know, plant-based burgers and stuff for sustainability. Because what we are is it’s sort of chattel to them. And so they play their games, they, you know, they speculate, they spend enormous amounts of wealth and power and influence all over the world. And I think the righteous anger that is sort of happening among the electorate over this period of time that was told that globalization was going to give us something and was going to provide us with what the World Economic Forum has says you will, you will own nothing, but you will be happy is one of their taglines is, in essence, the part of the driving factor of why I’m like, angry all the time.
Alexandra Bregman
There’s a lot to be angry about in the world. There’s also a lot to be thankful for. I mean, I said this to you, when we first spoke, my interest in food systems is localized. I think, like, native populations often know better. Particularly North America, as we know it, is very new. And the ancient civilizations that cultivated this land through migratory patterns through, you know, unique species of corn, that all was ancient; that lasted for thousands of years, and this is just a flash in the pan. Rome, ancient Rome, the Borgias, all these historical moments, they’re just a few hundred years and then kaput. And when I said earlier, I was reading about the plagues, you know, plagues change things. Plagues kill a lot of people, and they also radically change our thinking. And I think I am optimistic that this food system as we know it is clearly not sustainable, and it will shift.
On the flip side of that, though, I am very grateful for the globalized experiences that I’ve had: the opportunity to travel and see these snippets of the world. And I think that having a large—casting a wide net and seeing the world is always going to be a beautiful and appreciative thing that you can do, so long as we just do it in a way that we don’t burn it to the ground. So if we burn it to the ground, we’ll burn to the ground! I mean, I’m pretty fatalistic at this point. I’m like, if I die as a casualty of the COVID-19 pandemic, I was a member of this era; I participated actively in many toxic behaviors, and I had a great time! And now we’ll see. We’ll see what happens. So, that’s your art world two cents of the day, I guess.
James Connolly
Well, thank you so much for your time. I think this is a wonderful conversation. It was all over the place, and in many ways, the way my mind thinks. I really appreciate you being able to flow with it.
Alexandra Bregman
Yeah, I was trying to address all your points. I hope I answered what you want me to answer though. I really didn’t talk about the book that much. Please buy it, thanks.
James Connolly
So the book is called The Bouvier Affair: A True Story by Alexandra Bregman. If people want to get in touch with you, do you want to give out any Twitter or Instagram handles or anything like that?
Alexandra Bregman
So if you’re interested in the book on social media, I have like a couple things just up to reach out to me. I’m on LinkedIn—I’m pretty accessible, really. But yeah, whatever you want to talk about in the world, I try to be available.
James Connolly
Alright, thank you so much.
(Closing) Diana Rodgers, RD
Thanks so much for tuning in to the Sustainable Dish Podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a review on iTunes, and check out my website at sustainbledish.com where you can sign up for my newsletter, catch up on the latest blog posts, and check out my courses and favorite products. See you next time and thanks again for listening.
