2026-09-24T06:27:35Zhttps://api.repository.cam.ac.uk/server/oai/request

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/3916342025-11-04T01:42:04Zcom_1810_23com_1810_256063col_1810_221738

Un/Contemporary Arts: Norms and Forms in a Greek Art School https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.122692 Schmidt, Frederick 000000021429966X Navaro, Yael This dissertation addresses the fine arts education system in Athens, as I follow my interlocutors, students, educators and working artists over nineteen months of fieldwork. Greece is one of a few countries in the world in which aspirants need to compete in a live drawing exam in nineteenth- century academic realism to pass into one of the four art academies. They can sketch in this way because the overwhelming majority prepare for three years at private afternoon cram schools called frontistíria. I joined them myself in preparing and taking the exam in September 2021. The shadow education system, parapaideía in Greek, supports the livelihood of many working artists. Examining the para-educational system of fine arts education affords an informal view of the social reproduction of the artistic community in Athens and casts a light onto Greek society at large. By focusing on education and reproduction of artistic selves in Greece, my dissertation speaks to what renders artistic production in Greece both particular and parochial. Anthropologists of art and visual culture have concerned themselves with reconciling non-Western artistic traditions with Western Enlightenment institutions and notions of art. Ancient Greece is often treated as the origin of these ideas but anthropologists have questioned Greece’s historical integration into this canon in light of its crypto-colonial relationship to northern Europe. This dissertation attempts to provincialise artistic education at the borders of Europe, as remnants of Enlightenment aesthetic ideals in the Athens School of Fine Arts curricula live on in its September entrance exam. I call this form of aesthetic practice ‘un-contemporary,’ because of its outdatedness and to define it by what it isn’t: contemporary art. Contemporary art, often conceptual and non- figurative, is defined as a radical break with the previous pictorial arts. Yet at frontistíria, working artist-teachers teach un-contemporary arts to students. Studying the form of art-making through its temporal dynamic casts light on provincial modernities in the figurative and non-figurative arts. This practice emerges out of a colonial historical settlement and today structures my informants’ lived sense of belatedness. Inspired by my interlocutors’ use of art historical formalism, I engage this method as a ‘found’ conceptual apparatus. In so doing, my dissertation analyses a ‘return to form’ in thinking through the social and political infrastructure of arts education. Forms unite the social, the material and the aesthetic and outlive the conditions that give rise to them. Yet, my time in Athens was marked by significant upheaval; I arrived on the eve of the first lockdown, with another major lockdown and the Greek #MeToo moment disrupting the ordinary state of affairs during my research period — in a context that was already marked by what some term a ‘polycrisis.’ Rehabilitating formalism in this way requires reading aesthetic forms with and against social forms. I do so across four chapters that address, in turn, educational infrastructure, history, gender, and artistic production in conditions of crisis during the COVID-19 pandemic. University of Cambridge 2025-07-16 Thesis Doctoral Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) eng Arts and Humanities Research Council, Ling Roth Fund https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/391634 embargo 2026-11-03 https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/b769ebf0-1119-4f4c-bacc-8fa72844a285/download 7af6db39b48467b5b120877a70faf0e8 https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/921acbb0-8bbd-4b97-83eb-615da675da48/download 87eda9de84448d1f82354d60eee3eb5f https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ Aesthetic norms Anthropology of art Art education Contemporary art Formalism Greece Social Reproduction