ATHENS — “Sea, solar and intercourse, with some Greek columns within the background,” mentioned Poka Yio, the creative director of the Athens Biennale. He was summing up the Greek authorities’s tourism campaigns within the 2000s as he led a customer round a rambling former division retailer that was one of many websites of the 2021 version. A part of the motivation for beginning the biennale in 2007, he mentioned, was to alter that stereotype: “We needed to place Athens on the modern artwork cultural map.”
Fifteen years later, Athens is definitely on the worldwide artwork crowd radar, although extra as a curiosity than a serious hub. Regardless of the pandemic, 40,000 guests attended the monthlong Biennale, which ran via November. In accordance with the organizers, 10,000 of these got here from overseas, and the Greek capital additionally teemed with world-class exhibitions, together with the Neon Basis’s 59-artist group present “Portals” in a newly renovated former tobacco manufacturing facility.
“If the political powers understood how a lot Athens is being talked about as a up to date cultural vacation spot, they may pay extra consideration, as a result of it means cash and picture,” mentioned Katerina Gregos, the director of the Nationwide Museum of Modern Artwork, often known as EMST. However modern artwork, she added, is comparatively new to the Greek scene. “Now we have been dwelling underneath the shadow of the Acropolis for a very long time” she mentioned.
Gregos, who was born in Greece and was the founding director of the Deste Basis, earlier than later taking on the EMST job final summer time, was referring to the cultural dominance of Greece’s classical heritage, which attracts many of the sector’s state funding.
“It’s comprehensible,” she mentioned. “When you’ve such an unbelievable cultural heritage to safeguard, it’s an infinite accountability, and we’re a small nation with finite funds.” She added, “The fashionable Greek nation state was original based on classical concepts, so this consciousness is a part of our identification.”
In consequence, she mentioned, there was little or no authorities help for modern visible artwork, with no funding physique just like the Arts Councils in England, Canada or Australia, or state-funded group to help particular person artists. As an alternative, the hole is stuffed by personal establishments just like the Deste, Neon, Onassis and Stavros Niarchos Foundations, which hand out grants, host artist residencies and placed on exhibitions.
“The massive foundations have performed an enormous position in altering attitudes to modern artwork by creating an ecosystem,” Yio mentioned. “And Athens has one other distinctive factor, which is small initiatives. So many individuals come right here now to open artwork areas as a result of it’s so low cost.” The 2017 arrival of the every-five-year Documenta exhibition — the primary time the foremost artwork world occasion had been staged outdoors Germany — was a recreation changer, he added.
But these personal sector initiatives, no matter their success, don’t “substitute the necessity for a public coverage,” Gregos mentioned.
The Greek authorities appears recently to agree. In July 2019, Nicholas Yatromanolakis, a Harvard graduate, was appointed secretary for modern tradition, earlier than being promoted at the beginning of 2021 to the tradition minister’s deputy, liable for modern tradition.
Interviewed in his workplace within the graffiti-strewn central Athens district of Excharcheia, the 46-year-old Yatromanolakis mentioned that modern tradition hadn’t beforehand been seen as a severe contributor to the economic system, or essential to Greece’s worldwide picture and comfortable energy.
“The pandemic hit the modern sector very arduous, and I feel the prime minister acknowledged the necessity to make investments extra on that entrance,” he mentioned.
One among Yatromanolakis’s first initiatives was to get EMST open shortly. The museum, which was based in 2000, was a nomadic operation for 15 years earlier than a 1957 former brewery in central Athens was chosen as its website. However even then, lengthy delays in building and financing, extensively seen as symptomatic of systemic dysfunction, meant it wasn’t absolutely operational till simply earlier than the coronavirus pandemic broke out in early 2020.
Across the similar time, Gregos was approached by the tradition ministry to run the museum. She was each excited and skeptical in regards to the thought, she mentioned, as a result of the Greek financial disaster that started in 2009 had meant deep cuts in all areas of presidency spending. However she accepted. “It’s Greece’s flagship establishment for modern artwork,” she mentioned. “You couldn’t be supplied a extra fascinating and difficult job.”
Modern cultural initiatives in Greece are presently allotted round 1 / 4 to a 3rd of the tradition finances — which has averaged round $400 million for the final seven years — whereas the remaining is allotted to the classical heritage websites. It’s a comparatively small quantity when unfold between heritage initiatives, the nationwide theaters and museums, and modern tradition, mentioned Yerassimos Yannopoulos, a lawyer and board member of EMST. (For context, France’s tradition finances is round $4 billion.)
“The prime minister may be very a lot behind this concept of selling modern tradition, and Nicholas Yatromanolakis is a extremely good man, however Greece has been in a dire state of affairs for the reason that debt disaster,” he mentioned. He added, “And you may’t flip issues round by sticking to the fantastic archaeological legacy.”
But Yatromanolakis mentioned binary considering could be unhelpful. “I feel pitting the classical in opposition to the modern is unproductive,” he mentioned. “It ought to be collaborative,” he added, citing for instance a 2019 exhibition of works by the British artist Antony Gormley amid ruins and classical artifacts on Delos island.
In a follow-up e-mail, Yatromanolakis despatched the figures for state funding for small-scale modern initiatives, displaying a notable augmentation, from round half one million {dollars} in 2015 to round $11 million in 2020. He additionally highlighted further European Union funds from the Restoration and Resilience Facility, set as much as mitigate the impression of the pandemic, which gives one other half a billion euros to Greece’s tradition sector, equally divided between heritage and modern initiatives.
Afroditi Panagiotakou, the director of tradition on the Onassis Basis, mentioned that the dearth of deal with modern tradition in Greece was the explanation for creating the Onassis Cultural Heart. That constructing, with its two theaters and exhibition areas, opened in 2011. “We have been in an financial disaster and the Greek state merely didn’t have the means,” she mentioned.
However efficiently supporting modern artwork requires extra than simply cash, she added. “Finally the individuals who change the scene are the artists themselves,” she mentioned. “Our position is to help them, work with them, be there for them.”
Yatromanolakis mentioned that the personal foundations ceaselessly labored intently with the state, citing the Stavros Niarchos Basis Cultural Heart, which homes the Greek Nationwide Opera and Ballet, and the Onassis Basis’s funding for a brand new elevator for the Acropolis. “It’s not a contest,” he mentioned.
He added that essentially the most formidable mission on his agenda was labor and social reform for freelance artists, whose wants aren’t taken into consideration by present taxation and employment regulation. “If we don’t repair that, we received’t have the instruments to allow tradition professionals to reside from their work,” he mentioned. “There was nothing in place for modern tradition, so it’s important to begin from scratch,” Yatromanolakis added. “Regardless of all of the horrible issues the pandemic introduced, I feel we will use this as a turning level on how we do issues.”
Athens may not have monetary energy, mentioned Yio, the Biennale director, however with its inflow of migrants and artists, it was a rising metropolis, “a counterbalance to the London-Paris-Berlin tripod.” Greeks, he added, have by no means had “a bourgeois understanding” of artwork. “Modernism was missed right here, and we are actually making an attempt to make large leaps,” he mentioned. “We don’t have most of the methods and buildings that different nations have. However it is a very optimistic factor, too, and a part of what makes Athens so seductive. Every part continues to be attainable on this place.”