Pinchuk prize launch: from left Andreas Gursky, Eckard Schneider, Jeff Koons

Ukrainian billionaire Victor Pinchuk gathered a heady roster of supporters last night at the Gramercy Park Hotel to launch his $100,000 Future Generation Art Prize, an international competition open to artists under 35 years old.

Pinchuk, who has amassed an estimated $2.6 billion steel pipe fortune, used his financial muscle and cultural ambition to assemble a mostly male blue-chip board for the prize, including the Guggenheim‘s Richard Armstrong and collector Eli Broad, who both attended last night’s event, as well as Greek collector Dakis Joannou, musician and collector Elton John, MoMA‘s Glenn Lowry, Tate‘s Nicholas Serota, Pompidou‘s Alfred Pacquement and fashion designer Miuccia Prada.

Broad in foreground, Pinchuk to right of Broad

Pinchuk founded a Kiev museum in 2006, attracting 300,000 visitors in 2008. Shows included paintings by musician Paul McCartney, Japan’s Moriko Mori and Ukrainian artists. The museum’s budget was $4.67m. Pinchuk Foundation’s 2008 budget totaled $25m. (UPDATE: That’s about 1% of his net worth)

A portion of the prize launch was devoted to a discussion between artists Jeff Koons and Andreas Gursky and Eckhard Schneider, director of the PinchukArtCentre. Koons and Gursky are among four mentors (Murakami and Hirst are the other two) who have agreed to assist the winning artists. Pinchuk owns quantities of work by all of these artists.

Murakami and Hirst weren’t able to attend so they sent video clips.  Hirst, wearing jeans, a T-shirt and sunglasses, riffed on prizes, admitting he had never won any before the Turner. The Turner helped him in unexpected ways. “My muther suddenly understood my work and realized it was good,” he said. (Video clip here.)

Details of the mentorship are to be worked out, but that didn’t stop Schneider from speculating: “Perhaps the young artists will clean the brushes of Damien Hirst.”

The room was jammed with power players. Dealer Larry Gagosian, who represents Hirst, Koons and Murakami, attended the event, as did London dealer Jay Jopling. Jopling had toured Pinchuk around MoMA’s Gabriel Orozco press preview earlier in the day.  Architect Annabelle Selldorf, who designed Gagosian’s blockbuster Picasso Mosqueteros show, sat with the Gagosian.

Pinchuk sat at a small table beside collectors Eli and Edythe Broad and Barbara Fleischman. He made brief remarks, crediting Murakami, who runs a contest in Japan, for the prize idea. “Everything started in Tokyo,” he said.