In the immortal words of Venus de Milo, fuck off!

It seems that Greece’s current notoriety can be found in the unlikeliest places – even in the perception of a sculptor who may now attribute his little fights with his representatives or collectors to their obvious misfortune of being Greek… 

The newspaper was buzzing: “Can you believe the Deputy Prime Minister? What is he on? I mean, Angela Merkel must have been eight or something when the Nazis were doing all that.”

“The issue is political”, the in-house archaeology correspondent said, with obvious profundity.

The editor walked in. “Alright, I want all the monuments and works of art that have been desecrated, abused or just employed for political purposes. Two page spread, make it a list, like one, two, three, date, place, photo…”

“Sir?” this guy in the photo editing corner says. “We could do the same. Like, put a famous artist on the front page, holding a swastika or something.”

“Yeah” another guy says excitedly. “Like Pound or someone like that.”

“Um, you know Pound was not German, right?”

“But he was a Nazi.”

“Ok, everybody, back to work. Find me those monuments.”

I left the newspaper thinking that I didn’t feel offended. I actually felt amused, if not a little proud: there is a lot of envy in that raised middle finger.

The flight to New York is a moderately long one. After a gin & tonic, some wine, and the customary cramped slumber, we got talking: She is the presenter of a TV show on visual art. She is also from Greece. She is in New York, same as I, for Skin Fruit, the New Museum show with the Dakis Joannou Collection. Unlike me, however, she has just come back from Madrid.

She was in Madrid for the Tomas Schütte show in Reina Sofia, with a two-person crew, to do a scheduled interview. As she arrived at the hotel, going up on the elevator, she bumped into Schütte. She introduced herself, and told him she was the one that would be interviewing him the next day.

“No, no, no, no interview” he said. “I don’t want my face on Greek television”.

It seems that Greece’s current notoriety can be found in the unlikeliest places – even in the perception of a sculptor who may now attribute his little fights with his representatives or collectors to their obvious misfortune of being Greek. Though the sculptor didn’t elaborate, his dismissal echoes the prevailing sentiment: Greeks are people without a sense of good, honest, individual responsibility, sloppy and disorganized by nature, quite shrewd perhaps but not trustworthy, scrounging, lying little bastards, really. How did that guy put it – “expensive friends” to keep?

Nobody wants to be like that. And since the formulators of that speech have the power to make it dominant (we may remember: racism is not just stereotyping, it is stereotyping from a position of power), we have to choose: Either Greeks are not like that, or we are not that kind of Greek.

Most people choose the second option. They might have been born in Greece, but they were raised like decent Europeans. They are the ones being flattered into submission.

Though clearly I belong with the flattered, I am acquiring a sense of sympathy for the first option. Though not because I believe it is particularly just, moral or urgent to be asked to provide assurances for my trustworthiness. A trace of intelligence should suffice to know that the kind of stereotyping Greeks are subjected to in the international Press is really silly: unless of course one has never met unreliable Swiss, introvert Americans, or Egyptians who deserve to hold a driver’s license.

No, I am sympathetic to the first option because I think this barely two centuries old, modern state has done well enough. It has its problems, yes, and like everyone who has problems – states included – sometimes it lies about them. But, there are people in Greece who make a great deal of effort, and life in every respect, including cultural production, is unquestionably better than it was years ago.

I therefore have no time for any kind of imbecile who believes there is any merit in a formulation like “the country that produced Socrates has no important cultural figures today”. What we are missing is not another Callas. What we really need, we are making: new museums, new exhibitions, new independent, self-run project spaces, new places of debate, new performative arts festivals. Through these initiatives, we are questioning the very constitution of our identity, the very claims that leave us open to the stereotyping we are experiencing. This is what is needed – not a foreign film Oscar, a gold Olympic medal, or a Nobel Prize.

So, if you are a Greek and someone starts going on to you about where’s your contemporary Euripides and why he hasn’t rocked the globe yet with his lines, there is but one answer that truly does justice to the question:

In the immortal words of Venus de Milo, fuck off!

A Painters’ Curator

This morning I was reading NY mag’s ’112 minutes With Francesco Bonami’. The article belongs to a special category that we in the Press refer to as shallow de profundis. (Well, we don’t, but we should.) This couple of lines caught my eye:

“When artists find out I was a painter, they’re like Nazi hunters,” he says. “They say with accusation, with such anger, ‘You fucking bastard! But you were a painter! Like us!’”.

Not quite. Not “like us”. When being told that, one is always being reminded that they might have been a painter, but they failed. I envy the arrogance of a man that just does not care about the implication.

Which reminds me: nowadays, I often give thought to Bonami’s 2003 Venice Biennale. I remember hating it at the time, like everyone else. You couldn’t escape it. Hate was in the air. Like the heat, which was particularly bad that year, the canals dirtier and smellier than they’d been for some time. But now, that same arrogance – more necessary, actually, to pull off that monstrously democratic show than to make the above statement – has begun to ring with strange, unexpected qualities: sincerity – could it be? I cringe at the thought; but, yes, sincerity. And vulnerability, in the sense that such a large surface is just too open to stay safe. After all the canonical, politically correct, top-of-the-trends, we-all-live-on-the-same-planet, why-can’t-we-all-just-get-along international exhibitions I’ve been around in the intervening years, I have deeply missed that sprawling beast. I now think it is one of the best biennials I have seen.

Some PIIGS Are More Equal than Others

As we are bracing ourselves for another strike by the Unions of Civil Servants, tomorrow (in one of what will undoubtedly be a series of protests that will follow the Greek Prime Minister’s announcement of measures for the economy), I begin to realize there is a peculiar kind of reaction being shaped: though I have no statistical data and thus no way of knowing how widespread it really is, looking at blogs and social media, but also the mainstream Press, one gets the impression there are a lot of people out there that are losing their patience with the protesters.

These reactions to the protests usually take the form of quite plain common sense analysis: “These people [i.e. farmers, public sector employees, union members etc] have been milking the state for ages. I am tired of being the only one who works for a living. They are used to privileges that are unfair, simply because their local MP wanted to do favors to their trade union. We should have known there would be a time when corruption, clientelism, and false data would catch up with us. The EU and the foreign Press are right. We are the ones that messed up and we have to pay for it. We can’t expect the German taxpayer to bail us out. These people better assume their responsibilities.” And so on.

I have to say I feel for those that react in this way. We have something in common. For example, when my colleagues and I started to organize exhibitions, one of the first issues we came up against was clientelism in the Ministry of Culture. We decided that we had to do things in a different way, and built the first large scale non-profit visual arts periodic exhibition in the country, funded mainly through private sources. Let me not act like a saint here, the reason for this might not have been so much our moral stature – let alone our belief in ‘neoliberalism’ or the free market, as we have often been accused –, but our pragmatism: we did not have the contacts, anyway, in order to benefit from the state-sponsored feast. So, we did something else, until things shifted a little bit, edged on by the General Secretary of the Culture Ministry, who, in an incident one never tires of relating, reacted to the publication of a video with him getting a blow-job by one of his employees, by jumping out of a fourth floor window. (He lived, by the way.) Things shifting meant there was a temporary difficulty in taking care of the usual clients, and we finally managed to get some funding – about 12% of our budget – but the point remains: we were never asking for a favor, we were administering a serious endeavor that under every rule should have got the Ministry’s support, but didn’t, because we didn’t know the way to go about it. (I will not bore you with the maze of bureaucratic nonsense and the Kafkaesque series of appointments with different ministry officials that we have had to endure over the five years of our previous government, only to later find out about a whole list of NGOs, run by various ministers’ acquaintances, that got funding in the millions.)

So, based on personal experience, I have every reason to abhor the Greek state’s way of doing things, and to sympathize with what seems to be a rising reaction against those interest groups that oppose any and every corrective measure.

I do think, however, it is a rather shallow – though justifiable – reaction. I would argue it is in fact not a reaction based on a true political outlook, but rather a process of reverse aesthetisization, a stereotyping of the protesters into a convenient but arbitrary whole that encompasses everything that bothers us about ‘old Greece’ and the way it appears: discourteous, insular, uncultivated, slow, unglamorous, provincial – ‘analog’ in a digital age, one would be tempted to say. I would argue that our issue is mostly an aesthetic one. In being aesthetic it can, of course, form a political space, and in a way it is doing so, though without a serious questioning of what this space is becoming.

It stands to reason, though again it is an impression lacking data, that the ones reacting are mostly young or middle-aged professionals, fairly highly educated. They mainly work in areas such as digital technologies, economics, sciences, the Media, communication, or culture – ‘exotic’’ lines of work for the Greek middle class, such as it was, up to ten or fifteen years ago, and even today to some extent. Some of them live and work abroad, and those that live in Greece feel like they are here by choice: getting fed up and moving away is always an option. They have traveled and have seen different places, and they speak at least one foreign language fluently. They feel comfortable with other nationalities, and are often familiar with other countries’ idioms, history and sense of humor. In short, they take pride in being self-sufficient, productive, educated and cosmopolitan. And they feel that the country they come from has embarrassed them for way too long. They know they don’t deserve to be PIIGS, and they resent being in this position.

It is no wonder, then, that in the protesters they see everything they detest: the antiquated, paradoxical public services; the surviving state monopolies; the over-subsidized farmers who block the roads; the civil servants who give them attitude behind a glass panel, while taking off every day at 13.30; the people who make a career out of trade unionism, before they move on to running for MP; the tax officials who will take a bribe in order not to hassle you. And all this, dressed up in the unyielding, strange language of the Greek Communist Party and the populist trade unions that sounds like something that should be played on a gramophone. All this just looks bad, sounds bad, feels bad. It may seem cruel, but anyone who has spent a little time with a homeless person might get a sense of what this is like: you might feel for the homeless in an abstract sense, but once they start breathing in your face, you just want to go home.

Yet, there is a great danger in the way this reaction to the protests is taking shape. Its aesthetic constitution leaves it without a substantial political backbone. As a result, what is in truth an emotional reaction, becomes usurped by an ideology, that of open markets, abstract human rights, ‘individual’ responsibility, simplistic cosmopolitanism, and increasing biopolitical control. Common sense becomes a mask for what is essentially a programme that purposefully obscures the differences between state and society, economy and prosperity, country and people, models and bare bodies.

The fact is that the people I am describing, to whom I confess I belong, are being tricked by their relative social superiority into an unholy pact; they are being in effect flattered into submission. In reality, the distance that separates them from the arbiters of economic orthodoxy in Europe is far greater than the one that separates them from the protesters. The protesters may be wearing the wrong clothes, using the wrong words, and they may have a lot of bad habits. And some of them are without a doubt liars and manipulators. But a lot of them do suffer. This is not a lie. And nobody has convinced us that anything being done will alleviate their suffering. Nobody is telling them anything else but to shut up and suffer.

In the words of a blogger I often read: “The EU isn’t attacking Greece, or neglecting Greece, as Stiglitz claims. Greek capital will do well out of this. It will benefit from suppressed wages, will probably make a tidy profit from sold public assets, and will enjoy the continued access to Balkan and Eastern European labour markets that membership of the EU brings. It’s a not an attack on Greece. It’s a class war.”

Deeply disappointed as I am with the contemporary Greek Left, I would personally have avoided the expression ‘class war’ – quite often, I find, it creates more hassle than I need. But seeing it written, I can’t help thinking it is right. And the Left – for all its poor taste, its antique ways, its unfortunate language and sad strategic choices – is right, too.