Poor miserable FYTA thought that the call out would cause some kind of stir, a sort of scandal in the local art world. Of course noone really cared that much, it was not the first and it certainly was not going to be the last time that a major institution does not pay artists. If anything, the existence of things like WAGE shows that not paying artists seemed to be a frequent tactic in the contemporary art world and absolutely the norm in Greece.
FYTA started obsessing about the whole thing and they ended up presenting fragments of the New Museum saga in different contexts too!
One such occasion was the second installment of the exhibition Twisting C(r)ash in Athens. It was a two-part exhibition in Switzerland and Greece. While there was money for the first half (in Switzerland), somehow there was no money for the second half (in Greece). We found this an “excellent” opportunity to talk about DESTE/New Museum again and presented the video and crowdfunding text plus two pieces of aesthetically pleasing Appenzeller cheese.
Another example of the obsession with this one-sided conflict was the live performance of the “We Are the Art” song at the Athens School of Fine Arts, having invited local drag performes to join us, including Atossa, Clitus Clitoris, Mochi, Drosos, Alex Tsoli and Space Manifesto, one of the founders of the first Drag Queens Union in Greece (in the world?). This took place under the context of performance art cabaret night Glam Slam. Glam Slam was to play an important role in the next chapter of the saga.
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The crowd, a mix of no-future art students and anti-art FYTA allies, rejoiced.