The Donkeys and Jeff Koons Are Back in Hydra
Our spies spotted the formerly badass pop artist signing a book
HYDRA — The tourist hordes in Plaka were becoming too much to bear, so we headed for our least-favorite but also most-photographed of the lovely islands near Athens to momentarily pretend there could be a world without cruise ships and Instagram. We found donkeys — okay, they never really left, as the island doesn’t have cars — and an artist who was pretty badass in another decade, Jeff Koons…you know, of once-hitched to La Cicciolina fame:
Back in those heady days in the 1980s when pop art was actually dangerous instead of something destined for a Russian oligarch’s bloated superyacht, we sort of liked Jeff Koons. Then like a few other artists we could name, he co-opted his own celebrity to endear himself to billionaire patrons like Dakis Joannou who paved the way for things like, presumably, signing overpriced copies of your new artsy-ish book by the port of Hydra.
The last time we bumped into Mr. Koons it was at some banal conference at the Costa Navarino resort in southern Greece. At the time, we complimented the artist/product on his choice of purple shoes, and he — Picasso he’s not — did not have much to offer in response besides a polite dismissive smile.
Hydra is famously photogenic and has long been a magnet for self-important artist types, although recently blockhead Jared Kushner visited so maybe things are leveling off. Oh wait, Koons redux — so maybe not.
In any case, with all the new boats leaving for Hydra from Piraeus these days, there is only one we know of where you can actually sit outside. That’s Alpha lines. Be sure to ask for a 20 percent discount if you do a same-day roundtrip.
