Oligarts

Art-collecting oligarchs.

In May 2008, the BBC reported that Chelsea Football Club’s owner Roman Abramovich had bought two paintings – Lucian Freud’s “Benefits Supervisor Sleeping” and Francis Bacon’s “Triptych” – for a record-breaking sum of $119.9m. (The BBC noted, “a spokesman for Mr Abramovich declined to comment. He said: ‘We don’t get into personal matters’.”)

Commenting on the boom in Russian art-collectors, Francesca Martin wrote in The Guardian:

Are you up on the latest arts lingo? How about “oligarts,” the buzz word for billionaire Russian collectors such as Roman Abramovich and Daria Zhukova, currently snapping up the world’s most sought-after artworks.