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Many associate the culture of Athens with ancient ruins and artifacts. But the Greek government and several major philanthropic foundations placed the city on the foreign map of fresh art.
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By Roslyn Sulcas
ATHENS — “Sea, sun and sex, with some Greek columns in the background,” said Poka Yio, artistic director of the Athens Biennale. He summed up the Greek government’s tourism campaigns in the 2000s while driving a guest to a former disjointed branch that was one of the sites of the 2021 edition. Part of the motivation to start the biennial in 2007, he said, to replace this stereotype: “We seek to put Athens on the cultural map of fresh art. “
Fifteen years later, Athens is indeed on the radar of crowds of foreign artists, more as an interest than as a major hub. Despite the pandemic, 40,000 visitors attended the month-long Biennale, which lasted until November. According to the organizers, 10,000 of them came from abroad, and the Greek capital was also filled with world-class exhibitions, adding the collective exhibition of 59 artists of the Neon Foundation “Portals” in a recently renovated old tobacco factory.
“If the political powers understood how Athens is evoked as a new cultural destination, they may pay more attention to it, because it means money and image,” said Katerina Gregos, director of the National Museum of Contemporary Art, known as EMST. But fresh art, he added, is new to the Greek scene. “We have been living in the shadow of the Acropolis for a long time,” he said.
Gregos, born in Greece and founding director of the Deste Foundation, before taking over emst last summer, referring to the cultural dominance of Greece’s classical heritage, which attracts most of the sector’s public funding.
“It’s understandable,” he said. When you have such a cultural heritage to safeguard, it is a huge responsibility, and we are a small country with limited finances. She added: “The fashionable Greek geographical region has been formed according to classical ideas, so this awareness is a component of our identity.
As a result, he said, there has been very little government for fresh visual art, without any investment framework such as the Arts Councils in England, Canada or Australia, or any state-funded organization for individual artists. Instead, the void is filled through personal establishments such as the Deste, Neon, Onassis and Stavros Niarchos foundations, which distribute scholarships, host artist residencies and organize exhibitions.
“Large foundations have played a pivotal role in converting attitudes toward new art through the creation of an ecosystem,” Yio said. “And Athens has another unique element, which is small initiatives. Many other people come here now to open art spaces because it is so cheap. The arrival in 2017 of the five-year exhibition Documenta, the first time the world’s premier artistic event has been held outside of Germany, replaced that, he added.
However, those successful personal sector initiatives do not “replace the lack of public policy,” Gregos said.
The Greek government turns out to agree lately. In July 2019, Harvard graduate Nicholas Yatromanolakis was appointed Secretary of Contemporary Culture, before being promoted in early 2021 to the position of Deputy Minister of Culture, in fresh culture rate.
When asked at his workplace in Excharcheia, Athens’ graffiti-filled central district, Yatromanolakis, 46, said that in the past fresh culture had not been perceived as a serious contributor to the economy, or vital to Greece’s foreign symbol and comfortable power.
“The pandemic has hit the fresh sector very hard, and I think the prime minister has acknowledged the desire to invest more on this front,” he said.
One of yatromanolakis’ first projects to temporarily open emst. The museum, which he founded in 2000, was a nomadic operation for 15 years before a 1957 former brewery in central Athens was selected as its headquarters. , widely noted as a symptom of systemic dysfunction, meant it was only fully operational just before the coronavirus pandemic broke out in early 2020.
Around the same time, Gregos approached through the Ministry of Culture to manage the museum. She said she was enthusiastic and skeptical of the idea because the Greek economic crisis that began in 2009 had led to deep cuts in all areas of public spending. But she agreed. ” It is Greece’s flagship establishment for fresh art,” he said. “We couldn’t offer him a more attractive and challenging job. “
Contemporary cultural projects in Greece are lately allocated between a quarter and a third of the culture budget, which has averaged around $400 million over the past seven years, while the rest is allocated to classical heritage sites. This is a small amount when divided between heritage projects, national theaters and museums and fresh culture, said Yerassimos Yannopoulos, a lawyer and EMST board member. (For context, France’s cultural budget is about $4 billion. )
“The prime minister has a lot of this concept of selling fresh culture, and Nicholas Yatromanolakis is a really brilliant guy, yet Greece has been in a terrible scenario since the debt crisis,” he said. He added: “And you can’t replace things by attachment to the excellent archaeological legacy. “
Still, Yatromanolakis said binary thinking can be useless. “I think opposing vintage to fresh is unproductive,” he said. Antony Gormley among ruins and ancient artifacts on the island of Delos.
In a follow-up email, Yatromanolakis sent the public investment figures for new small-scale projects, which look like a notable increase, from around a part of a million dollars in 2015 to around $11 million in 2020. He also highlighted the largest investment of the European Union of the Recovery and Resilience Fund, created to mitigate the effects of the pandemic, which contributes another billion euros to the Greek cultural sector, also distributed between heritage and new projects.
Afroditi Panagiotakou, director of culture at the Onassis Foundation, said the lack of concentration on fresh culture in Greece explains why the Onassis Cultural Center was created. This building, with its two theaters and exhibition spaces, opened its doors in 2011. “We were in an economic crisis and the Greek state just didn’t have the means,” he said.
But, effectively, creating new art requires more than money, he added. “At the end of the day, the other people replacing the scene are the artists themselves,” he said. “Our role is for them, to paint with them, to be there for them.
Yatromanolakis said personal foundations work heavily with the state, highlighting the stavros Niarchos Foundation’s cultural center, which houses the Greek National Opera and Ballet, and the Onassis Foundation’s investment for a new elevator to the Acropolis. “It’s not a competition,” he said.
He added that the maximum ambitious task in his schedule was the labor and social reform for independent artists, whose wishes are not taken into account through the existing tax and labor legislation. “If we don’t deal with this, we probably wouldn’t have the equipment. “to allow cultural professionals to make a living from their work,” he said. There was nothing in position for fresh culture, so you have to start from scratch,” Yatromanolakis added. Despite all the terrible things the pandemic has brought, I think we can use this as a turning point in the way we do things. “
Athens would possibly have no monetary power, said Yio, the director of the Biennale, but with its influx of immigrants and artists, it was an emerging metropolis, “a counterweight to the London-Paris-Berlin tripod. “The Greeks, he added, never had “a bourgeois understanding” of art. “Modernism has been missing here, and now we are looking to make massive progress,” he said. “We don’t have many systems and structures that other countries have. But it’s also a positive thing and a component of what makes Athens so attractive. Everything is still imaginable in this place.
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