Woland and the Chocolate Factory

The Red October Chocolate Factory is one of the enduring symbols of Russian culture, not that you'd know, because it's not open to the public and Russian chocolate doesn't taste good. Still, it certainly looks like a place where revolutionary chocolate is made, and for that reason if no other it's treasured in Moscow.

It's no longer a house of chocolate, though. Last year, all of Krasny Octyabr's chocolate-y goodness—its nougat-factory center—was removed to the suburbs, leaving a pretty brick building with a funky sign primed for the sort of enormously expensive condos that paved the New Arbat. (Who wouldn't want to hold real estate situated inside one of the enduring symbols of Russian culture?)

Preservationists will passionately argue that evacuating Moscow's chocolate factory has left an empty shell that used to be home to part of Moscow's soul. If it does nothing else, contemporary art lives to fill this sort of void, hence Gagosian Gallery's preciously and yet ominously titled show, "for what you are about to receive", which opens next month inside Red October.

Now, Moscow is a very wealthy city, crowded by the newly rich who surfaced when Russia's industries were privatized and whose fortunes have enjoyed the rising tide of oil prices. There should be no surprise if the art market runs red with rubles. Tastemakers like Dasha Zhukova are steering Russian interest, and Russian investment, toward contemporary art. So long as Yuri Luzhkov, mayor of Moscow, is going to tear down old Moscow anyway, it might as well be contemporary art that takes its place.

Still. When Larry Gagosian comes to Moscow, filling a hollowed-out factory named after the Bolshevik revolution with Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami, it's hard not to brand him as Woland from Master & Margarita on a return tour.