Once again mega-collector Dakis Joannou gathered the international art world between Athens and Hydra for a long weekend of celebration—now an essential post-Art Basel stop, if not the trip’s main draw. Given the state of the world and the art economy, many who landed in Greece this past weekend simply longed for a slower pace, a few days of genuine connection without the usual urban performance and a brief escape from rising global unrest. This is the only art week where New Museum artistic director Massimiliano Gioni might be your neighbor under a beach umbrella, carving out family time amid a full slate of DESTE Foundation-organized events linking the Greek capital to one of its most beautiful islands. In a recent interview, art collector and DESTE founder Dakis Joannou told Observer the date was “deliberately chosen right after Basel, so people would be done with everything they had to do, and they could close the season and come together, have fun, relax and that’s it. The formula really worked.”
“Hydra is becoming important not only for Greece but also for Europe,” Petra Schäpers, a representative of the auction house Dorotheum, told Observer during the opening of “In a Bright Green Field” at the Benaki Museum. Organized by the DESTE Foundation in collaboration with the New Museum, the exhibition spotlights Greek and Cypriot artists working across diverse media and themes, promoting the local contemporary scene to an international audience. In it, twenty-nine emerging artists imagine future possibilities while grounding their practice in local knowledge and history. Many works raise questions of belonging and identity as these creators from culturally rich countries consider where they fit into a rapidly changing world.
