DIONYSIOS: GOOD TASTE

---

What is Good Taste? Can someone own it? How?

Through his first attempt at taking over an institutional exhibition space, Dionysios interrogates the very system that creates him. The gallery operates as a double agent: it participates in, while simultaneously undermining, the mechanisms of contemporary art. Good Taste takes the form of the acquisition of a title. The visitor enters the system. The collector enables it.

The exhibition constitutes an auto-referential critique of the institutional economy of contemporary art. It foregrounds the role of galleries, curators, certificates and the market as discrete stages through which “good taste” is constructed, validated and circulated as a form of symbolic capital.

Certificates of “good taste” are offered for sale as fetishised documents of an immaterial process of value determination and prestige production. The gallery is revealed as a factory of value, curation as a process of selection and exclusion, and the market as the final stage of validation.

Historically, “good taste” has never been a neutral aesthetic category. From the academies of fine arts and the circles of the Dilettanti to the formation of the first museums and the art market, it functioned as an instrument for regulating cultural competence and as a means of social distinction.

The exhibition brings back to the fore this hitherto unspoken function through a caustic yet rigorous relational gesture. Through the pricing and commodification of the very documents of recognition, the certificates themselves, Dionysios exposes the following paradox: institutional critique is possible only within the very institutions it seeks to question.

As Dionysios observes, “in a society where cultural capital is inherited, visibility is regulated, and recognition often follows nepotism, Good Taste exposes how status circulates. Holding a certificate positions you inside a system that most can only observe.”

Just as indulgences converted the salvation of the soul into a manageable document, so too the certificates transcribe aesthetic cultivation into proof of social power.

Each Certificate is unique. It bears a signature, a seal and a serial number. It circulates exclusively through Roma Gallery. The number of Certificates is limited.

Once they are acquired, Good Taste is complete.

Extending beyond the sanctioned space of the gallery, Good Taste situates its inquiry within the public sphere through the placement of a gold-leafed trash bin into the urban fabric of Kolonaki. 

Through this relational gesture, Dionysios expands the discussion from the protected framework of the exhibition to the base materiality of the streets of Athens. The intervention is formally reduced and conceptually exacting: an object designed for the collection of waste and infrastructural anonymity is subjected to a material treatment historically associated with sanctification, permanence, and surplus value. This spatial displacement disrupts the apparent neutrality of public space, revealing it instead as a battlefield shaped by emerging economies of attention, circulation, and hierarchy.

The intervention, however, does not monumentalise the condition it exposes.

The work re-enters the gallery and the exhibition space bearing—both literally and metaphorically—the traces of an institutional reality that continuously classifies, stabilises, and reclassifies what may enter the sphere of value.

Within this expanded framework, art does not emerge as a public good, but as a negotiable field in which aesthetic authority is exercised, challenged, and rendered operative.