‘The Oligarch and the Art Dealer’ Directors on the Billion-Dollar Feud Exposing the Hidden Art Market: ‘Better Than Gold and Diamonds’

A $1 billion dispute over dozens of masterpieces involving a Russian oligarch, a Swiss art dealer and one of the world’s most powerful auction houses takes center stage in “The Oligarch and the Art Dealer,” Andreas Dalsgaard and Christoph Jörg’s three-part documentary series premiering in full this week at Cph:dox.

The pilot episode debuted earlier this year at Sundance Film Festival. Copenhagen marks the world premiere of the complete series, which traces the decade-long legal battle between art dealer Yves Bouvier and Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev – a conflict that exposed how masterpieces worth hundreds of millions circulate through private deals, offshore structures and high-security storage vaults.

“We’ve spoken to many very wealthy people while making this,” Dalsgaard tells Variety. “They uniformly say that investing in art is considered maybe the best investment – better than gold, better than diamonds.”

The idea for the series was born from Dalsgaard and…