CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/12/2016

Deste 33 Years: 1983–2015

Reproduced here is one of the endpapers to Deste 33 Years: 1983-2015, the deluxe, thousand-page overview of the super-adventurous, world renowned art (and design) collection initiated by Dakis Joannou in 1983. Familiar to virtually everyone even remotely connected to the contemporary art world in the 1990s, the original source of this image, which reads, "spiritualizing it," is the catalogue (designed by Dan Friedman) to the landmark 1990 Deste exhibition Artificial Nature (curated by Jeffrey Deitch), which featured work by Ashley Bickerton, Walter De Maria, Jeff Koons, Liz Larner, Ed Ruscha, and Robert Smithson, among others. Collection catalogues often feel tired and mausoleum-like. This book goes in another direction entirely, presenting an over-the-top roadmap down memory lane, reminding us how far out front Joannou has been, and stayed, for more than three decades. It is, the words of Linda Yablonsky, who profiles Joannou in the current issue of Interview magazine, a copiously illustrated oral history of a program that has been as uninhibited as it has been groundbreaking.