Dinner was at the ultra-hip Semiramis Hotel, one of five hotels that Joannou owns in Athens, in which the public spaces abound with art from the Deste Foundation of the Joannou collection. In the morning, we were going to the island of Hydra for the weekend, on Dakis’s ninety-foot cabin cruiser, Protect Me from What I Want. (The name comes from one of Jennny Holzer’s aphoristic L.E.D. Sculptures.) Bickerton nearly missed the boat; he had been arrested, for unspecified activities, in a late-night bar near our hotel and detained briefly; the night manager had helped to free him, but he had overslept.

After Bickerton absorbed some sea air and several cups of coffee, his resurgent sense of mischief fastened on Deitch, who was dressed, as usual, in one of his Caraceni suits (no tie, but still a suit). “This guy is so uptight,” Bickerton announced, hugging Deitch affectionately. “He has an iron rod from his anus all the way to his neck.” From time to time, Deitch would withdraw from the others on the boat to have a brief, intense cell-phone conversation, presumably with a client, about the upcoming London auctions. The trip to Hydra took about an hour. We anchored in a cove at one end of the island for lunch, which turned out to be a Greek banquet, served on the fantail. Everyone swam off the boat except Deitch (another source of merriment to Bickerton, who swims like a porpoise), and by late afternoon, when Protect Me from What I Want pulled into Hydra’s harbor and we loaded our luggage onto donkeys for the ascent to the Joannous’ place , about halfway up a steeply terraced hillside, Holzer’s message had lost some of its ironic bite.

—Calvin Tomkins, “A Fool for Art,” The New Yorker, November 12, 2007