If you find yourself in Athens between now and January 24th, follow my advice and visit the What does new and interesting mean? exhibition at AD gallery. This group show is curated by Pantelis Arapinis, Director of the gallery, and it presents a great selection of works by leading emerging as well as established Greek contemporary artists such as: Nelly’s, Caniaris, Kessanlis, Kounellis, Samaras, Steve Gianakos, Takis, Pavlos, Chryssa Romanou, Akrithakis, Markou, Christodoulides, Velonis, Sagri, Charissis, Theodoropoulos, and last but not least, Nikos Papamiditriou.

AD gallery assistant Galini Notti tells us a few words about the exhibition.

Alexis Akrithakis, Le Roi, 1966; Savvas Christodoulides, Genne d’Etre Artiste, 2007; Georgia Sagri, Untitled, 2003

Nikos Markou, Untitled, 2007; Steve Gianakos, Chubby boy sees chubby girl, 1981-2007

 Notti discusses works on the 1st floor of the gallery:

Vlasis Caniaris, Face-to-face, 1969; Chryssa Romanou Casino International, 1965; Christos Charissis, Untitled, 2008

In the order they appear in the video: Takis, Telelumiere, 1980; Steve Gianakos, Dining Without Music Was Unforgivable, 2007; Nikos Kessanlis, Self-portrait, 1986; Nikos Kessanlis “Metadomi”, 1971; Savvas Christodoulides, Hald-moon, 2005; Jannis Kounellis, Untitled, 1965; Stephanos Tsivopoulos, The Remake, 2007

Pavlos, Affiches Massiocotees, 1965; Giannis Theodoropoulos, Landscape 15-13-6-2, 2008-07; Lucas Samaras, Autopolariod (set of 12), 1971

The show successfully merges the now with the past. At first glance it may appear familiar to the eye but on a secondary level the gesture and the harmonious co-existence of the works take over the experience. It’s a cohesive exhibition that showcases works from different eras created at a variety of locations by Greek artists. The works at times complement each other and at others they complete the thoughts of the viewer in the space. Conceptual and formal affinities can be traced throughout the show, thus a visual rhythm, if there is such thing is established instantly—without being obvious.

Remember to pick up your Athens Contemporary Art Map from any artspace you might stumble upon along your walk.

Don’t get lost!

Art21 is collaborating with the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) on a public program series titled Art:21 at SAAM. The film series presents episodes from the award winning television program that include artists in the museum’s collection. Place (Season 1) will be shown on Wednesday, January 14 and features artists Laurie Anderson, Barry McGee, Margaret Kilgallen, Sally Mann, Pepón Osorio, and Richard Serra. To whet your appetite, below is a clip from the episode.

Mark your calendars!

Art:21 at SAAM Films
Place, Season 1,  Art:21–Art in the Twenty-First Century
Wednesday, January 14 – 6:00 pm
McEvoy Auditorium, Lower Level
Smithsonian American Art Museum

Stories, Season 2,  Art:21–Art in the Twenty-First Century
Thursday, February 12– 6:00 pm
McEvoy Auditorium, Lower Level
Smithsonian American Art Museum

For more information on this and other programs at SAAM, visit AmericanArt.si.edu/calendar. Questions about this series should be directed to saamprograms[at]si.edu or (202)-633-8490. Dates for the spring series will be announced later this winter. Stay tuned!

On the topic of art and controversy, I thought I’d share a teaching-related story of my own. Previously to working at Art21, I was an associate educator at the New Museum, where I ran a high school program called G:Class. While the museum was closed during construction of its new building, I relied on Chelsea galleries to explore curricular connections to contemporary art. As a way to help develop a sense of network and inter-connectivity among students in different classes across the city, I developed a mail art project on the heels of Frank Warren’s Post Secret, connecting it to a Ray Johnson exhibition and the documentary about his work, How to Draw a Bunny. I asked each student to create a postcard-sized artwork to be sent to another student through the mail. Students had to investigate something they feared, something they loved, or if they were really ambitious, both. They also had to consider that this work would travel through the United States Postal Service and the student who received it would respond with another piece of mail art.

A week after I assigned the project, we met at Feigen Contemporary gallery to present the finished project and begin our tour. It was a small group of 12 students and the discussion was dynamic, involving talking about process and the ideas that inspired their creations. One student sheepishly presented two postcards. One of his postcards featured a detailed graphite rendering of an erect penis and, on the other side, a vagina. The second postcard featured a red background with stick figures in different sexual positions with a white substance smeared on the other side (it was Elmer’s glue.)

I could feel my face burning and imagined that it must be beet red. Here I was, exposed in front of these students. How was I going to deal with it? I saw the student shrink because of my reaction, so I took a deep breath and knew that if I didn’t acknowledge my own emotional reaction I would not be able to deal with this situation responsibly.  I told the class I was a bit shocked and embarrassed and in admitting that, I was able to regain my composure.

I asked the student what he was trying to communicate. He told me he questioned why certain behaviors and images are deemed “appropriate,” while others were “inappropriate.”  Why are certain things considered pornographic, but billboards in Times Square or primetime television shows are not? Why are some things considered private while others are public? These comments intrigued me and were justifiable concerns. We had a productive conversation about these issues as a group, while acknowledging how his artwork failed to communicate this nuanced idea and just shocked us. It was one of those difficult moments in teaching where a boundary was definitely crossed but presented a rare and important learning opportunity for both the student and myself.

I returned to the school and next week armed with reproductions of certain artworks that explored elements of sex, sexuality, and issues of privacy.  These examples included work by Paul McCarthy, Wangechi Mutu, Marina Abramovic, and Keith Haring. We talked about these artists’ works, the ways in which sex and sexuality are part of daily culture, and how artists use different strategies to question ideas of the public and private, sex, and sexual identity.  While this “lesson” would never be part of my regular class preparation, it provided a rare opportunity to address issues relevant to students in an open and respectful way.

Wangechi Mutu, Yo Mama (2003) and Paul McCarthy, Tomato Head (1994)

I’m curious how other educators have tackled similar scenarios. How has sex and sexuality come up in your classes? What were those situations and how did you deal with them? Please share your stories by leaving a comment below.

Schadenfreude is so central to how the art world functions that it’s no surprise to hear the sound of two hands rubbing together when it comes to talk of how the economic meltdown will affect contemporary art. After all, one of the conditions of working in the art world—like working in Hollywood or the music industry—is that you have to declare yourself outside of it (or above it) on a regular basis (i.e. Sean Penn). When the conversation hovers, vulture-like, over the subject of the recession, a commonly voiced belief, shared by some journalists, is that the ebb of cash could only have positive benefits for ‘real’ artists. Somehow, the newly ascetic art world, once rid of aluminum lobsters and solid gold supermodels, would undergo a kind of bizarro-Renaissance, blossoming into creative maturity on a shoestring budget. Somehow, the diminished opportunities for artists to show and sell works (which will inevitably be a byproduct of the recession) would be just the wake-up call contemporary art needs, a sort of “we’ll do the show right here” spirit that’ll give art a reason to exist.

It’s hard to bemoan what will almost certainly be the passing of an era whose defining image is a skull with glittery pimples. No one’s going to cry at the thought of a cat-stroking oligarch having to hock his billion-dollar Bacon. That said, it’s equally hard to echo the cackling I-told-you-so-ness of some commentators. Poverty has never been the creative catalyst popular art history would have us believe, and, in the absence of a WPA-style  shot in the arm, it’s likely that art’s centrality in popular consciousness will wane dramatically over the next few years. Certainly, the demise of artwork-as-bauble is no bad thing, but the undercurrent of this somewhat puritanical approach to contemporary art is a pretty depressing one, reminiscent of the grotesquely gleeful press coverage of the Momart fire in 2004, in which several significant works of art were destroyed (it’s also oddly similar to art purges of history, especially Savonarola’s ‘bonfire of the vanities’ in Renaissance Florence, in which paintings, sculptures, and objects associated with the perceived decadence of the ruling classes were publicly burnt, often with the artists’ consent).

However tempting, applauding misfortune is never useful, especially in the fickle world of contemporary art. And if the art world can benefit from the economic downturn, then it will be through self-reflexivity. The confluence of art object and luxury product has (especially over the last year) been so successful a piece of misdirection that discussion and analysis of meaning has been largely overlooked. In order to shed its associations with flatulent wealth, art will have to defend its intellectual territory, bling or no bling.

I arrived in New Orleans in December on an auspicious occasion—it was the first snow fall since 2004 and one of only a few that has touched down in this normally warm city in the last forty years. As a Northerner, I felt strangely welcomed to this southern metropolis, and it took me a while to realize that New Orleanians, who aren’t accustomed to snow, seemed confused at first but adapted soon enough.I don’t know what I expected when I arrived in New Orleans but images of Hurricane Katrina were rife in my head as I headed downtown from the airport, thinking I would see signs from that disaster. Little did I know that all the scars of Katrina had all but disappeared from most of the city and what I found was a welcoming place that seemed a fitting venue for Prospect.1.

Judging from the biennial map, the art venues seemed rather evenly sprawled across the city in all directions. A quick orientation at the Hefler Warehouse by a hyperactive tour guide explained that while the tour may appear daunting at first, it isn’t as bad if you concentrated on the 22 main locations (formerly 23) that displayed the work of the primary artists (of which there are 81). For the more adventurous, there were 20 secondary and 71 Art City Site venues, the latter dominated by small commercial galleries showing art by local talents.

After a day of art tourism through the snow and feeling that I had a grasp of how to effectively spend the rest of my four days in New Orleans, I sat down with Dan Cameron, director and curator of Prospect.1, to talk about his vision for this the largest art biennial in North America.

A New York-based curator, Cameron fell in love with New Orleans when he first visited in 1987 and happened upon the city’s renowned Jazz & Heritage Festival. Since that fateful encounter, he hasn’t missed a Jazzfest in 21 years. More recently, Cameron has become the Visual Arts Director of the New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center (CAC), a leading venue for art in the South. As he explained what he set out to do with Prospect.1, the conversation inevitably turned to the topic of this unusual city.

“New Orleans is a big work of art itself,” he explained, “a form of social sculpture.” These were words that resonated with me; in my day-and-a-half in New Orleans, I had already sensed a theatrical air both in the streets and the Prospect.1 venues. I immediately noticed that music was more prevalent in the art venues than other biennials I had ever seen. At CAC, Candice Breitz’s Legend (A Portrait of Bob Marley) consisted of thirty television screens signing Bob Marley’s Buffalo Soldier. The noise resonated throughout the museum. At first it felt nostalgic and familiar, but eventually it started grating on my nerves until I decided it was obnoxious, as it seeped into my experience with at least half a dozen other works. At the Old U.S. Mint, Sanford Biggers’ Blossom (2007) endlessly played Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit. But this time, the ominous song made you feel like something mysterious lay around every corner and it felt welcome, if somewhat chilling.

Cameron pointed out that while New Orleans may be best known for its cuisine, music, and nightlife, it was a sensual city that appreciated all forms of pleasure, remarking that, “creative expression is central to New Orleans’ identity.”  He added that New Orleans sustains its culture through architecture, cuisine and the arts, and Prospect.1 is working to ensure that visual art plays a crucial role in that evolving identity.

During our conversation, I mentioned that walking through the biennial felt like I was endlessly learning about New Orleans as I discovered new work and its context within the city. The content felt fresh and even works that didn’t seem to fit perfectly into the biennial, like Isaac Julien’s Baltimore, were different in this context. Cameron admitted that he included Julien’s work simply to introduce his work to the local scene. Julien’s video work is bold and enigmatic. African-American characters walk into different types of museums and make us wonder about the role of artifact and consciousness raising, particularly in a black cultural context. Three screens project various perspectives and narratives that all seem colored by the 1970s. There is a strain of science fiction in the work that added an air of amazement while making me wonder if the artist was trying to speak more about our cultural future rather than our past.

Cameron was pleased with the way the interaction between artists and venues played out and when I pressed him for details, he cited Navin Rawanchaikul and Tyler Russell’s project as a perfect example of what art could achieve on a local scale. As the result of a typo in an obituary, the multicultural Thai artist learned of the death of local jazz great Narvin Kimball. For their contribution to Prospect.1, Rawanchaikul and Russell organized a traditional New Orleans jazz funeral complete with banners painted in a style reminiscent of Bollywood posters. The funerary march took place during Prospect.1′s opening weekend and the result, according to Cameron, was warmly welcomed by the community, which included jazz musicians, family, friends and fans, all of whom seemed to appreciate Rawanchaikul and Russell’s fresh and sincere approach.

I then asked Cameron how locals were reacting in general to this ambitious art biennial that rivals anything that even New York or Los Angeles could conjure up. “New Orleanians are ready for anything,” he assured me. So, I ventured out to see if that was true.

This post is the first of five on my four days in New Orleans touring the sights and sounds of Prospect.1.

Television: the small screen, the idiot box, the tube, the boob tube, or the box. With all that’s on television nowadays, Katerina Zacharopoulou presents The Age of Images – a 60-minute weekly TV program on contemporary art. Airing since 2003 on ET1, a state-owned TV channel, it has proven to be the remedy to my chronic skepticism about art on television.

To this day, The Age of Images remains the only TV program in Greece that follows Greek artists at major national and international exhibitions. The program records and archives the contemporary art scene via current art events. In six years, Zacharopoulou has presented and introduced to the general public some of the most influential Greek and international artists including Janis Kounellis, Marina Abramovitz, Gilbert & George, Richard Long, Jan Fabre, Peter Greenaway, Joseph Kosuth, Tony Cragg, Bill Viola, Sophie Calle, Tony Oursler, Christian Boltanski, Ghada Amer, Nikos Navridis, Kostas Tsoklis, Pavlos, Alecos Fassianos, as well as leading curators such as Rosa Martinez, Robert Storr, Dan Cameron, Missimiliano Gioni, Denys Zacharopoulos, Anna Kafetsi, and Hou Hanru. The show has extensively covered the programming at the Louvre, MoMA, Grand Palais, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, as well as the Venice and Istanbul Biennials. In short, Zacharopoulou has covered over 150 exhibitions of contemporary art.

Interestingly, Zacharopoulou was initially trained as a painter. In the early 90s she attended a series of art educational seminars on contemporary art at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris directed at children and young adults. Driven by the language in contemporary art as a vehicle of communication, and by the role of the artist as mediator of knowledge and experiences she began experimenting with television in 1993 . Good Afternoon Mr. Picasso, on ET1 was a children’s weekly program, which presented twenty-four artists’ portraits spanning from the Renaissance to the 20th century. Innovative graphics and animations drew children to the visual arts and acquainted them to what otherwise would not have been introduced to at school. Between 1995 and 1999 on SEVEN-X TV Channel, Zacharopoulou presented a program on visual arts where she spoke with Greek artists such as Blasis Kaniaris, Nikos Kessanlis, Chryssa Romanou, Kostas Tsoklis, Pavlos, Yeoryios Lappas, Nikos Navridis, Alexandros Psichoulis, among others. The show was called Art-Fil. Next came a collaboration with the publishing house Kastanioti to produce a CD-ROM called Arts station, promoted through her program With paper and a Mouse, airing on ET1 in 2000. Programming that reflected the times and interests of children seemed an ideal solution to inspiring them. Art Show followed on NET TV Channel, a one-hour program exploring the relationship between art and fashion.

Finally, I got to see Katerina Zacharopoulou in action at the set of The Age of Images.  She is a warm, approachable, and composed host of gentle and hospitable demeanor.

Maria Karavia was the guest that day, known as a pioneer of cultural and art programs on Greek Television some years ago. Mrs Karavia had studied Art History and worked for the Greek Service of the BBC World during the dictatorship in Greece. Karavia is an accomplished author, whose name is closely associated with Greek art at large.

It was a pleasure being on the set that day, seeing two generations of Greek art TV hosts meet and swap stories.

The following is my recent interview with Katerina Zacharopoulou:

Georgia Kotretsos: You’ve been in conversation with acclaimed Greek and international artists, curators and collectors for six years now on The Age of Images set. Overall for nearly two decades, your need to converse has taken various forms, by targeting different age groups at a time – thus I’m curious to find out what has taken you as an artist down this parallel career path?

Katerina Zacharopoulou: Television seemed to be an interesting medium, which I could make art accessible to children, I was hopeful enough to perceive it as an educational vehicle. Good Afternoon Mr. Picasso first aired in 1993 on ET1, and served as a children’s studio – where there was put emphasis on the value of children’s art and the role of the child as an artist. I had extensive training in art education and sufficient previous experience off camera that allowed me to pursue such a program on that scale. To my surprise soon after, I was approached by a private TV channel, SEVEN-X to present a talk show, where I’d converse with professional artists about their work. It was an exciting parallel activity in terms of making a livelihood as we are all familiar with the struggles and difficulties of our profession in that department. I felt at ease right away, it felt natural, I forgot the cameras and got to work – trying to distinguish and further unfold the private and public persona of the artist across from me. One thing led to another and since 2003 I’m presenting at ET1 The Age of Images. My work gives me immense pleasure and satisfaction — coming face to face with different personalities of Artists, one at a time while figuring out what that means in its case individually. I’m interested in the idea of the artist as the mediator where the visual image can and is communicated.

I see the body of these interviews as a work in progress in terms of my own practice. I recently began thinking of them in terms of my own work and how that intense journey is reflected in my practice today. It’s interesting to note that two years ago at the Bernier/Eliades gallery in Athens, I showed a video work entitled 6-minutes about where I interviewed myself, going back to the idea of the public/private persona of the artist, which I’m poorly discussing right now but I’m bringing it up cause it’s important for my own practice to see how my two roles came together without evidence of collision.

GK: Typically, TV would be the medium to avoid for the kind of program you present, yet you have managed to lure the average TV viewer to the art world through The Age of Images, while maintaining the quality of conversation at a level anticipated by the art audience and by continuing to stimulate an engaged dialogue within the Greek and international art community.  What are the pros and cons of the TV as a medium when it comes to art?

KZ: TV is a prevalent and simultaneously a public platform perfectly fitted for educational and cultural ventures and initiatives. The challenge has been communicating contemporary art to the uniformed viewers without compromising the art language. I intentionally did not negotiate the parameters of language — I find it contrary to the nature of art to adapt to jejune modes of communication hoping to reach more viewers. One thing worth mentioning in this regard is that the flow of conversation is interrupted by TV commercials, which affect both the discussion per se and the experience of the viewer at home. Overall The Age of Images through the TV makes contemporary art accessible to the boarder public and it is particularly optimistic that viewers have followed art through this programs despite the specialized language used in the discussions.

GK: The Age of Images is archived at the State Television Channel and in digital form at the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST) in Athens, Greece. Do you see value in commercially producing a DVD series of The Age of Images interviews, which could then easily be part of any library, studio or office of any art professional around the world?

KZ: There is immense value in the prospect of commercially producing a series of DVDs but that would require appropriate permissions from the ET1 TV Channel. Also, now that I’m thinking about it, if selected thematically and re-edited to create a focused series on a variety of subjects – it would be ideal for libraries, seminar classes and other educational purposes. I hope to do this some day. Possibly ERT, would be in interested in investing in such an ambitious project. It could also be funded and produced by an alternative public or private sector. The exciting thing is that in 2009, ET1 will create a website where The Age of Images program will be available online.

Don’t miss tonight’s show at 6pm – Zacharopoulou will be talking to Greek collector E. Emfietzoglou.

Nancy Spero‘s Un Coup de Dent opened this week at Galerie Lelong, New York. The Season 4 artist exhibits an early body of expressionistic works referred to as the Black Paintings, as well as related drawings created between 1954 and 1965.

Made while she was living in France, the Black Paintings are somber works-on-paper, images of lovers, mothers and children, and bestiaries that allude to “existential oppositions and emotional turmoil.”  Spero worked on these paintings over a long period of time and often at night, haunting them with the romantic, nightmarish, and mythic sensibilities of the bewitching hours.

Un Coup de Dent  runs through February 21st.

What’s the place of contemporary art in schools?  What’s the place of “controversial” contemporary art in schools? And what’s our responsibility as teachers?

The very best contemporary art speaks a language our students can understand. One of the great gifts of Art:21 is that we can introduce our students to artists who LOOK and SOUND like they do, and who are making art that deals with issues that are important to them.

Kids grapple with issues of sex and identity early on. Stereotypes abound: girls are princesses, boys are athletes; girls are good at art and boys are good at math. Beautiful people are tall, light-skinned, with clear complexions and good hair and are very, very thin. What’s a regular every day kid to do?

A few years ago we presented a show called Sugar and Snails. It was created in response to a desire to have open conversations with our students about issues of gender identity and body image. Even at very early ages kids deal with questions like these, and it’s our job to help them make healthy choices.

Samantha Salzinger’s Skin Deep Series provided opportunities for our middle and upper school students to directly confront issues about beauty. For adolescent girls AND boys conversations about eating (or not), complexions, hair, makeup, tanning, tattooing and piercing, exercising and all sorts of other physical issues are every day occurrences.  Salzinger’s large format portraits of patients recovering from plastic surgery called into question all of our assumptions, both student and adult, about the price of beauty.

Samantha Salzinger, from the Skin Deep Series

Our students responded with works of their own. Human sexuality teacher Debbie Roffman asked middle school students to create collages that highlighted the stereotypes and subliminal sexual messages in popular culture. Their work showed their understanding that sex sells everything from beauty products to cars to home appliances. In their collages, the students created thoughtful, funny, often startling pieces and raised our awareness about how the media helps reinforce stereotypes.

Nikki S. Lee, #7 from The Skateboarders Project (2000)

Nikki S. Lee, The Tourist Project #9 (1997)

Photographer Nikki S. Lee’s work really called into question the whole idea of fitting in. In her Projects, Lee identifies a group (tourists, Hispanics, yuppies, elderly people, lesbians, and others) and works to transform herself to be as much like them as possible. That’s Lee herself in the foreground of the skateboarders piece and second from left in the tourist piece. Our students looked at works like these and (almost without fail) took a closer look at how they, too, reinvent themselves to conform to a group norm. It happens very early, doesn’t it, when “everyone” has a particular shoe or backpack or haircut? Nikki S. Lee’s work provides an opportunity to talk to kids about it.

It’s work like this that helps open conversations with kids about issues that make a difference.

Check out more about Nikki S. Lee in this month’s Art Education magazine: Identity in Flux: Exploring the Work of Nikki S. Lee by Amanda Allison. It includes lesson plans for grades 9-12 that explore identity within contemporary subculture groups. January 2009, Volume 62, No.1.

Carolyn Sutton is Director of Arts at The Park School in Baltimore and a member of Art21’s National Education Advisory Council.

Veiled in a cloud of national bereavement, I am here to write about art, but first there will be an introduction.

The peaceful demonstrations, the protests, the riots, the rallies, and finally what it seemed to be a civil unrest began taking place in Athens, Greece on Saturday, December 6th, 2008.  Earlier that evening, a policeman in downtown Athens for who the f*** knows why shot dead a 15 year-old high-school student.  Despite the fact that the policeman has been charged with murder, this devastating incident was the tip of the iceberg for the Greek youth, who have been left with no room to dream of a future; for my generation, which is also widely known as the “€ 700 generation”; for those in mid-life confronted with dead-ends and for the senior citizens, who gasp hopelessly – unable to make a dignified exit.

It’s important to clarify that (a) the groups who are peacefully demonstrating in the streets of Athens with (b) those who are strategically attacking civil offices and (c) the left-winged union demonstrators along with (d) those who excel in Molotov cocktail and rock hurling plus (e) everybody else in between are different groups of people. It is unfair to homogenize the aforementioned groups and further criticize a society based on who is the loudest.

I condemn all forms of violence and vandalism and I have been firm on this since the very beginning. Yet in a cloud of ambiguity the media, a political party and many civilians justified the mayhem and fed its appetite. A state of simmering pandemonium stamped this holiday season and with no further delay, a bloody dialogue was set in motion in the early hours of January 5th, 2009. Thirty Kalashnikov shots were fired towards three policemen who were guarding the Ministry of Culture. The gunmen sealed the attack with a grenade. A 21 year-old policeman was wounded and still remains in critical condition.

Both shootings took place in Exarchia, in downtown Athens. When asked about January 5th, a middle-age female resident of the area said with confidence to a news reporter “I heard Kalashnikov shots been fired.” Who can distinguish the type of a gun by its shots in the middle of the night in Athens? The death of the student has sparked the worst riots for decades, which escalated to be a sociopolitical vendetta. Is this a society of an eye for an eye?

Why is this all happening? For way too many reasons that go too far back, but most importantly because the Greek gluttonous government in power since 2004 is digging a hole and inviting us all to jump in.  For the last 18 months, new scandals make weekly headlines, there isn’t even enough time to react in between – the lethal combination of a corrupted government and a lethargic Prime Minister, Kostas Karamanlis, is what we’re left with at a time of severe economic stagnation, a chronic lack of meritocracy, an endless list of social injustices and continuous brutality towards protestors, which in this case were often teenagers, by the state.

How could I ever link this intro to the art postings I’ll upload from Athens for you in the following days? Maybe I can’t and maybe I shouldn’t and for that I have to say this now.

Art may echo this page of Greek contemporary history, but I’m not convinced it’s entirely necessary unless we’re willing to individually evaluate the role of art within the contemporary Greek society and further admit openly the kind of voice it has for each one of us, and then get on with our day.  There is life after art and if artists are willing to react, or make a stand, they are not obliged to call it art – an artist is also a citizen.  If anybody finds comfort in turning this into some careerist driven niche, I’ll personally stay away. An open dialogue that’s not addressed exclusively to the intellectual elite can be an initial answer to our racing thoughts.

Sometimes we come closer to art outside the art world. On December 19th, 2008 mainly through facebook and other social networking sites, a call to decorate with trash the 2nd erected Christmas tree for 2008 – on Syntagma square was widely distributed. The first one was literally lit right after the student’s shooting. Despite the preceded events, the mayor of Athens was determined to feel the Christmas spirit by putting everything behind us. The tree was guarded throughout the remaining holiday season.

The optimistic side is that I live in a society that the loss of a 15 year-old life still matters. And I want to believe that it equally does when another life is put at risk. What’s pessimistic is the outlook of those who found the protests incomprehensible, it’s frightening that, that too has to be explained.

Stay with me the next couple of days, and I promise to stick to what I know and to what you come here for.

Teaching in the arts requires, at one ugly point or another, to have veiled conversations called critiques. They are hideous things that most students from middle school through graduate school would often rather avoid. Visits to the dentist can be more exciting. But as educators we’re often in the position of having to conduct them in order to force students to slow down, pause, reflect, and make decisions about the quality of their work.

In-progress critiques can have a tremendous benefit for both students and the teacher, because instead of discussing work at the end of an assignment or project, the discussion takes place before the work is complete. It gives students a chance to share the direction they’re going instead of the destination and invites suggestions for important next steps.

During a recent in-progress critique, students in my classes looked at some paintings they are creating about power, influenced by Art21 artists Ida Applebroog, Cai Guo-Qiang and Laylah Ali. All of the works—half finished—were hung up. Students seated themselves somewhere close to their painting at the start of class on Monday and I asked them to look at the work for two minutes in silence. What I really asked was for them to look at it until they began to see it. I asked the class as they sat in this bizarre silence (believe me, if you teach, you realize how bizarre and beautiful silence can be in a school setting) to think about the positive aspects of their work so far, but also to focus on next steps in order to create a successful painting based on the criteria we set up. After the silence they shared their thoughts with a partner and by the end of the critique had formed a short, written plan to guide the rest of the process. After taking a look at their plans and adding my own ideas, we made final decisions the next day and jumped back in.

Because creating contemporary art and being inspired by it requires students to meaningfully reflect on the work they see and the work they make, it’s part of our responsibility to construct situations where students can step back from the rhythm of a process and consider possibilities—alone, with classmates, and with their teacher.

In-progress paintings by Nyack High School students Julio Melendez (top) and Heather Bailey (bottom).