I.

One Friday morning I was lying in the bed of a young woman who lived on Kursavoy, by the river, just a short walk from Kropotkinskaya Station. Her apartment had a view of the golden domes of the Zachatyevsky Monastery. While those domes are not as grand as those of the nearby Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, they still hold the onlooker in a trance, especially through snow.

Waiting in her fridge were eight marbled tea eggs, quail, which we planned to eat with syrniki and coffee. The previous night we had boiled the eggs in Shaoxing rice wine, soy sauce, and black tea spiced with Sichuan peppercorns, star anise, and dried chilis. Lying there at that moment I was suspended on a nimbus of insuredness.

I received a message from my old boss. I was positive he would thrust some job on me, and I sighed, feeling apprehensive. My only hope was that this job would be exciting enough to write about later.

His message was a question with an abnormal inflection, “Are you circulating well in Moscow?”

To which I responded, “This morning I came awake in the upper crust of a Russian cake.”

He wanted me to do investigative research on the Russian art market, an internal report for the Division. He promised a handsome bounty. But he wouldn’t disclose much, and I realized that I trusted him to never tell me anything that would actually get me in trouble. He only gave me exactly what he needed.

By virtue of his counterintelligence faculties, he knew I was good at lying, which is an important skill in these kinds of investigations. And let me say—I was proud to have sold myself as a good liar, but it’s a slippery slope. For someone to truly know that you can lie, you must have done it to them.

He suggested we talk on Signal, referring to it as comsec, which was amusing. Signal is actually encrypted, he said. So I won’t need any of your ambiguous poetry. And for a moment I meditated on poetry as encryption, which is a technique that American writers will never understand because they have too much freedom.

Chatting over Signal he asked, “Do you know about the War in Donbass?”

And I said , “Yes, I follow the news.”

“Snarky. Well do you know about the sanctions?”

“Yeah, I know that after Russia invaded the Ukraine they were sanctioned by America. But I can only guess how they’re getting around it. Probably like Deutsche Bank moving billions from Moscow via mirror trading?”

“Yeah well, no. The big banks are too strapped. It’s getting abstract now. Do you know what the least regulated market in the world is?”

I said “Gosh idk, weapons??”

“Weapons are the most regulated! It’s art that’s the least regulated. And I bet you never thought your art degree would be worth anything lol.”

He sent me a classified Senate .pdf with the title The Art Industry and U.S. Policies that Undermine Sanctions.

He continued “We think the oligarchs are using the art market to move billions, and the Division is under heat. We kinda need to know what’s going on. And your social graph shows that you’re near the center of it.”

“My what???”

“Your social graph. I’ll tell you about it later.”

“Wait, what am I at the center of?”

“Don’t worry about it. For the time being we just need to learn more about this guy.” And he sent me a picture of a short, balding man with a beard. The nameless man looked like an Irish gnome. “He is supposedly an American art dealer, runs a lot of money through his art house in Moscow.”

“Alright.” The conversation ended there.

The propane stove clicked on in the kitchen, and I rolled over to grab my pants from the floor. We warmed up the tea eggs while the syrniki cooked, and then ate.

The think tank where I was receiving a research stipend was located on a small island between two prongs of the Moscow River. It was just a ten minute walk over the bridge from her apartment. I felt happy when she decided that she would walk with me. On the island, we broke off, and she continued onwards to her office at a consulting firm somewhere around Oktabryskaya.

“Tonight you will go to the museum opening?” she asked.

“Yeah, then I’ll text you after.”

Earlier that week a kultur-mag editor named Kirill had invited me to an exclusive soft-opening of the K-A-C, a high-profile museum touted as the Whitney of Eurasia, the project of Russia’s wealthiest gas tycoon and his daughter. The museum was still very much under construction, though its Foundation had been running biennales for several years. I had been excited for the invitation, mostly for the food and drink, but also to soak in the campy style of the moneyed Russian youth—a fox-fur jacket over a purple leather corset, baggy slacks, and Nikes browned by slushy street snow. There might be fun drugs and wealthy gallerists, and I might get to meet the gas heiress.

With my boss’s request, the invitation to the K-A-C had a new valence. The network of invitees were the types who might be involved in schemes that linked Russian money to the US and Europe, perhaps through the New Museum, maybe through Gagosian. Art, I thought, is like the encryption system of capital, the cryptographic language of global elites.

II.

The event starts at seven. I meet Kirill at the White Rabbit around dusk, just next to Smolenskaya. We order vodkas at the bar while we wait for a table. The White Rabbit is very nice, it overlooks Moscow and five of the Seven Sisters are visible from the glass-domed veranda. The Seven Sisters, aka Stalin’s Skyrises, were all built between 1948-1953, Kirill says, a monumental achievement for the Soviets, the tallest buildings in Europe at that time.

Kirill nurses his drink as we find our table, wise of him not getting too sauced before the event. He orders blini and several caviars as I throw back my second.

The blini is fine, but the caviar is exotic. Like eating gems. The Persians were the first to perfect caviar. They called it Chav-Jar, which translates to “Cake of Power”. They believed that caviar cured a variety of diseases and was eaten to improve stamina. As we eat, Kirill teaches me the Axiom of Caviar, which is the correlation between the quality of the product and the violence of its sourcing. Behind every pristine ramekin of rare Osetra there was a fisherman boating secretly through the night, a distributor beaten and imprisoned, an overzealous food inspector kidnapped and disappeared. The geopolitics of the Caspian is essentially written by the genus Acipenser, and the Russo-Iranian caviar market is more barbaric than amphetamine trafficking.

I’m trying to determine if he means to elevate my experience or sober it, but the mention of amphetamines breaks up the train of thought. I remember that I have modafinil in my pocket, which is actually not a stimulant, but belongs to a better class of drug: the eugeroics. Eugeroics are wakefulness promoters designed for narcolepsy, but now prescribed for shift work, like at Amazon distribution facilities. So I run off to the boys’ room and pop two, then ruffle my hair in the mirror.

When I return, there’s a new caviar, and a new topic of conversation. With a bit of prodding, I get Kirill to paint me a map of the Russian art world and the event we’re about to attend. He tucks his napkin into his shirt and begins explaining how there is renewed energy around Russian cosmism, and that this Neo-Cosmist subset is beginning to fit into the elite institutional framework. The Muscovite upper crust are “hungry for culture,” as he puts it, and his position is important as the editor of this magazine because he has the ability to set a political aesthetic in relation to the public. He describes how major capital investors in the culture space understand that new art mediums will steer Russia’s future. As the great fatherland submits to state capitalism, art must take on a new role, which is critical yet imaginative, and the oligarchs are sinking large sums of money into soft-power institutions which both prevent the emigration of the intelligentsia and create the soil for seeding the future.

I shovel a quarter of the caviar into my mouth as he finishes the thought. We go into a long silence. He sips his drink, looking around at the other guests as the sun dips below the horizon. Still chewing, I reach for the high-octane vodka and make a swill of the opulence, my throat stings as I swallow. I announce how vigorous things feel and he smiles warmly.

“It’s customary for this black Iranian Osetra to be served with Petrossian Vodka in a frozen flute like this” indicating the glass, which he studies thoughtfully before tipping to his lips.

We order a Yandex, and head to the event.

The K-A-C Foundation is located in a retired electrical factory, originally built in 1907—a beautiful building undergoing refurbishment. Its four blue smoke stacks are visible everywhere in central Moscow. We step out of the taxi into a thick cloud of exhaust that hangs in the headlights of idling sedans. The bouncers look like separatist mercs, who on a different evening might just as likely be pressing into Ukrainian territory, or perhaps overtaking an administrative building in Donetsk.

Kirill and I are ushered into the foyer. After being groped by men with coiled earpieces and rimless black shades, we are offered espresso. The impromptu design looks like a Heron Preston pop-up shop, like something you’d come across in Shanghai Pudong or Seoul Incheon. Decadent greatcoats hang like dead mammals in stylish wooden cabinets, lit softly with concealed LEDs. Bobby Shmurda is playing, which to me is a scorchingly intelligent decision – the smartest part of what’s going on right now. Graphically designed floor decals steer guests through the first security check-point. Waiting in the queue with my coffee, I observe the extent to which the splashy cyrillic typeface screams self-exoticization, a posture to the West.

And wow, the modafinil has me registering entirely new orders of detail. My brain feels like a distribution facility, like an extremely efficient global distribution machine of packages of ideas which coagulate into an emergent complexity that is beyond the reach of the law and displaces the old gendarmerie of rationality.

I sip the coffee and glance around, feeling warmth swimming in my belly. I hear English and French, soft around the Russian edges, and no longer feel so glued to Kirill. I step through a hulking metal detector and into a temporary hallway that was probably installed yesterday. Passing through, it does indeed create the dramatic effect of emerging into the breadth of life through a tight birth canal.

Now we’re inside the museum, where no more than sixty people are circulating. They all look stunning.

The old concrete shell is undergoing renovation, molting, and everything is well lit. Mounted space heaters give shape to the social arena near the center of the cavernous great hall, and there is landscaping inside. Miniature palms, shrubbery, hanging walkways, vertical gardens—kind of like a cross between Biosphere 2 and the Tate Turbine Hall. It’s teeming with life, Jurassic.

The architect, Renzo Piano, has opted for a hyper-orthodox axial organization, basically a Christian church where one could imagine an Olafur Eliasson Sun in the apse. The exposed HVAC and hanging walkways are reminiscent of the Centre Pompidou. The windows are being amplified to create more light, and panels of glass the size of billboards are suspended on cranes. I’m trying to understand how the glass will fit into the steel fittings, and the specular reflection, and the south-facing aspect of the building, and the interior climate for the plant life. Have they actually thought about the energy requirements for thermal retention at this latitude? Perhaps they’ve opted for thermal glazing, or maybe the logic is climate change. And I remember that Moscow will eventually be a temperate biome, maybe even tropical by the time they’ve made their ROI on this behemoth. Imagine that! And I start dreaming of a hybrid city, a cross between Miami and Moscow. North Beach, hot real estate. Peter Thiel on the K-A-C board when?

I really have to piss. I also need to stay focused.

In the very center, food and drinks are being served by the grove of palm trees and mediterranean shrubs. And on the edge of the social arena there is a tasteful arrangement of detritus from the work in progress, travertine tiles, extension cords, jackhammers, just to prove that things are in fact moving forward.

It occurs to me that this is a very exclusive event, as I transition from the architectural order of detail to the social order, scanning the faces of the other attendees, who are dressed to the absolute nines. I wonder what the purpose of the soft-opening is, and Kirill doesn’t seem to know either, maybe to announce a partnership with an institution abroad, or a new round of funding.

There’s lots of fur, but I don’t see any purple corsets. There is a male model that I vaguely recognize from IG wearing a Marine Serre full body suit, the kind of model with a comically aggressive face and dark bags under his eyes. I assume the conservative woman standing next to him is his auntie, a benefactor. There are lots of pearls and diamonds. And I want to describe all the jewelry, but I know it’s a distraction. I found the restroom.

There is a beautiful mixture of Parisian and Russian food. Servers have Murmansk cod and ponzu sauce, kumamoto oysters, cups of okroshka with milky mushrooms, and basil chips with goat cheese and aubergine. There are also miniature croque madames. There are little dessert bites of salty Napoleon cake and sturgeon caviar. Berried caneles of some kind, maybe with currants. I snap a picture of the crusty cake and send it to my boss, to confirm that I am truly going in. I write “soft-power/hard liquor”.

There is a lot of liquor, and I’m getting ahead of myself. I snag a macchiato off a roving tray. I’m conversing fluently, I forget in which language. And then, I fall in with a drunk guy named Vova, a gallerist who appears to be working at the same level of detail as me. We clink cups, and I begin my soft probe, hoping he has tea to spill.

I know that Vova is drunk and I am too, but not like him. I find myself carefully digging for information about these oligarchs, like unearthing a delicate artifact. I’m being tactical not reckless. Asking about him. What are your connections? Who do you swing with? Who is that? I know in the back of my head that my questions could be throwing up red flags, but they are not. With Kirill tagging along, I’ve guided Vova up onto a mezzanine. I want us to see everything from the logistical perspective. I want to situate our conversation in the Amazon of pure thought.

By this point, the opening is becoming a proper party, and it has stratified by age. The elder suits and the major curators loiter on the ground floor around the drinks and the food. The mid-level administrators and gallerists of middle-age have their ambulatory ambition, walking along the empty gallery spaces in the wings of the museum. And the youth—heiresses, nephews, 3d artists, KM20 models, editors, and writers have taken to this mezzanine, where they can watch the party from above, while retaining enough secrecy to snort drugs and plan trysts to Sochi.

From our hawk-eyed position, he points out two dominant figures. Firstly there is Dasha Zhukova, the Russo-American queen regnant of art power. Founder of Garage, matron of Murakami, champion of A Pattern Language, trustee of LACMA, ex of Roman Abramovic, and goddess of the Greek shipping empire. And then Boris Rotenberg, Lord of gas and energy, builder of infrastructure, winner of no-bid Crimea contracts, head of SMP Bank, master of motors, and judo partner of Putin Himself. They’re standing just near the drinks, chatting with a smaller man and I notice how much he looks like a gnome! I can see in perfect detail that he is balding with a reddish beard, like an Irishman, and that he wears artistic spectacles and an Oriental suit jacket. What a coincidence, it must be the Eccentric dealer that my boss wanted me to key on.

I say to Vova “I’m sorry, my vision is not so great, who is that man they’re talking with?”

“Oh, that’s Gregory Baltser.”

“Oh of course, Mr. Baltser!”

Vova opens his mouth to ask if I know him, but Kirill interjects with something smart, thank god. I take the chance to google ‘Gregory Baltser’, pretending to scroll Instagram. Scarce results. But I do see a facebook page called Club Baltzer, spelled with a ‘z’. It appears to be some sort of art club located just off the Arbat. Vova and Kirill are still talking about something, then Kirill departs for a key of K and it’s just me and Vova again.

“So is Gregory Baltser involved with Club Baltzer by chance? ” I ask.

“Why yes, he runs it! Have you been?”

“Yes, I’ve been several times, but I don’t think Mr. Baltser would remember me.”

“Well let’s go chat with them.”

I’m trembling as we descend the stairs to speak with the true lords, Mrs. Dasha Zhukova and Mr. Boris Rotenberg, and their art dealer, Gregory Baltser. I slam a vodka on the way over to calm my nerves, moving closer to the drunken edge of recklessness. Mind sharp, but vision beginning to waver.

Vova steps us into their discussion, which seems fairly friendly. He introduces me to Mrs. Zhukova first and then the others. They ask what I do. I manage not to stutter, telling them that I am a writer and futurist. I say a bit about my work, making sure to mention my brief stint as a researcher for Hito Steyerl, at which point they gush. For some reason I’ve chosen to speak in Russian but with a French accent, thinking it might lend me legitimacy, and I pray to God that none of them inquire into that.

The conversation is going well, I only speak when spoken to. And miraculously the five of us are now walking down a wing of galleries, toward a barrier of caution tape in the rear. There I see that a stainless steel Carsten Holler slide has been installed behind a large veil. Unable to contain my authentic excitement, I blurt out “Let’s ride the slide!” and they all laugh hysterically at my joke! Dasha saying what a jester you are! And I am relishing in their good graces.

We head to the stairwell, but instead of going up to the slide, Baltser announces that he was just about to show Mrs. Zhukova something special downstairs, and he leads us into the cargo hold of the museum below, Vova plying him with innocent enthusiasm.

We arrive into a spacious archive under the main museum hall. It is nearly the same volume as above, but darker. A strong wind pulls through the cavern, like being in a wide mine shaft, and there are many towering archive stacks under construction, some of them already laden with art.

But hidden behind the stacks near the back of the cargo hold, there is an enormous reflective blanket covering a structure. Baltser tells us he has a surprise, speaking mostly to Mrs. Zhukova, and that we must be sure not to say anything about what we see.

We stroll in silent apprehension through climate-sealed racks of paintings and titanium boxes which I assume hold rare sculptures and other spoils of foreign war. Without a word we approach the place where the reflective blanket covers the tremendous object the size of a mansion. And just then, as Baltser opens his mouth, a powerful wind pulls through the space and rips the reflective blanket away, carrying it elsewhere.

We stand in absolute awe, staring at the thing. Vova curses to himself, Mrs. Zhukova gasps with reverence. I shudder and cast a sidelong glance at Baltser and Rotenburg, who are smiling maniacally at the radiant object.

They are pieces of a space station. Under construction in the cargo hold of an art institution.

The system is divided into shippable components, and around each segment of the space station are small payloads—crates of art being packaged up and prepared for transport.

Gregory begins speaking in Godmode:

“The Space Freeport is an art asset management platform that has already been launched into Low Earth Orbit, 700km above the surface of the earth, traveling at 27,000 km/hr. The freeport is one of a kind, state-of-the-art show space and art archive—undoubtedly the first in its class. Soon, investors and collectors will be able to travel to the freeport, if they so choose. But for the unrocketed plutarchy, they can hold accounts with the K-A-C Freeport Association, and do their buying and selling free of any of the usual constraints that apply to assets at sea level. Those on earth can use their telescopes on clear nights to watch as it speeds across the sky.”

My jaw hangs open and my stomach is lurching. I feel unstable on my own feet. He continues:


“What you see here is the assembly of its first collection, the first payload. This rocket-gallery is scheduled to dock at the Space Freeport a few short months from now. You see, art has the highest value-to-weight ratio of any object known to humankind, making it perfectly suited for outer space asset management. Think of it like a bank with a digital currency which is backed by these art assets. The cost of launching the freeport will be far outweighed by the benefit of housing billions of dollars of art in space, which can be leveraged against, or transacted with, according to an unimaginable degree of security and anonymity. The Geneva freeport contains over $100 billion of value, but it’s crawling with auditors. We think our modular docking system can contain more value than that, and without anyone snooping about. Due to a statute of space law called In-Orbit Transfer of Ownership, this freeport can be legally transferred to any national jurisdiction at the drop of a hat. So we have an art freeport which, for all intents and purposes, is legally anywhere but also nowhere. Pieces can move between Russian, British, American, or Chinese docks whenever there is a need to transact with a ‘foreign’ account.”

All the liquor catches up with me and in an instant I’m three sheets to the wind, verging on blackout. Even off this bean, my mind can’t fathom the ingenious complexity of the operation. My memory is wiping out and I have the spins, thinking I should snap a photo for my boss and run for it. But the thought of running turns my stomach over, about to vomit. I get this sick vision of thousands of black sturgeon eggs which are coming alive in a frenzy in my gut. I try to speak up, I start vocalizing, as the contents of my gut begin streaming forth, ejecting out through the birth canal of my throat onto the floor and towards the space station. The sturgeon eggs are swimming upstream towards the space station where they can infest outer space with geopolitics of the Caspian.

I’m bellowing as I purge the last of the space caviar, and my consciousness is subsumed by infinite spheres of black panspermia as I fade all the way out.

III.

The next morning I woke up fully clothed on Kursavoy, in the same bed as 24 hours ago. I had a blistering headache, afraid I might vomit if I moved a single muscle. Black dribble had dried onto my chin. I rolled over carefully in bed, looking at the snowdrifts which had accumulated in the window sill. The domes of the Zachatyevsky Monastery were glittering gold, the most amazing aspect, but this time their purity mocked me. I tried to puke but nothing came.

My boss texted me, asking me what I learned the night before. I panicked, racking my brain for memory, but nothing came to mind. The last thing I remember was hearing Bobby Shmurda and seeing images of a tropical Moscow before blacking out. I had no recollection of anything after that, and I sheepishly told him as much.

“Are you lying to me?”

“I’m not lying to you.”

I told him that I was sorry, but that whatever secrets I had learned the night before were now gone from my mind. I reassured him that I would have other chances soon.

When I put my phone back into my pants pocket, I felt the corner of a card. It was a Club Baltzer card with an Arbat address. On the back there was a handwritten note which said:

What a sick imagination you have 🙂

– Dasha Z