ATHENS— As a stimulating antidote to this summer’s blockbuster art gatherings — the ongoing Venice Biennale, the debut earlier this month of the François Pinault Foundation’s hang at the Punta Della Dogana, and the recent Art|40|Basel — the new installation at the DESTE Foundation in Athens, “A Guest + A Host = A Ghost,” featuring 15 artists from the Dakis Joannou Collection, affirms that collector’s world-class standing and unfettered ambition to make waves in the global art world.

Organized with the collaboration of New Museum curator Massimiliano Gioni and artists Maurizio Cattelan, Urs Fischer, and Cecilia Alemani, the show, on view through the end of December, follows Joannou’s tradition of presenting his collection, with the help of friends, in a different way each summer.

This viewer was largely bowled over by the submarine-like depth of Joannou’s collection, seeing, for example, 12 major pieces by Robert Gober from 1978–2007, most likely the biggest slice of his work on view since the artist’s midcareer retrospective at the Schaulager in Basel in 2007. (If there were any lingering doubts about Gober’s stature after two of his pieces were bought in at the auctions in New York last month, they seem trivial now.)

Organized in a meandering maze of single-room vignettes, the exhibition presents some startling juxtapositions of cutting-edge artists, such as the pairing, on the second floor, of eight powerful gouache-on-paper works by Kara Walker from 1996 with Urs Fischer’s monumental, cast-aluminum grave, Untitled (Hole) (2007), which literally cuts a hole through the floor of the DESTE building.

On the first floor, the work gouges through the ceiling to disturbing effect — almost as if a meteor had struck — and makes and impact on the works nearby, including Jeff Koons’s large oil-on-canvas Liberty Bell (2007) and Andro Wekua’s bravura installation Wait to Wait (2006), a midcentury-modern-inspired vitrine containing a wax figure of a man seated in a lacquered aluminum armchair, staring into a corner, thinking about God knows what.

The ubiquitous Fischer seems unstoppable these days, from his installing Peter Brant’s collection at the collector’s new Brant Foundation Art Study Center in Greenwich, Connecticut, which opened last month, to his highly anticipated survey at New York's New Museum, opening in late October.

And following the digging-through-the-floor trend is Cattelan’s untitled, partly submerged figure/self-portrait of his head sticking through a manhole cover, installed alongside Paul Chan’s series of haunting charcoal-on-paper portraits of the members of the U.S. Supreme Court, “My Laws Are My Whores” (2008).

The exhibition, which takes its name from Marcel Duchamp’s 1953 mixed-media work, also included in the show, also boasts a big closet of scary and über-ambitious entries. Among those is Black Market (2007), a kind of tormented domestic scene fabricated by Polish artist Pawel Althamer from a long roster of ingredients — including PVC, ebony, swamp oak, various tools, and otherwise unidentified intestines — and addressing the diaspora of African immigrants, along with other disturbing subjects.

Even Cattelan gets deadly serious and ghostly with his pristine installation All (2007), another edition of which is on view at the Punta della Dogana. This one features nine covered bodies carved from white Carrera marble that could be representative of anything from civilians mistakenly vaporized by a Predator missile, to ambushed soldiers from somewhere in the world, to an ancient burial scene of Cycladic figures.

As the ultra-brief introduction states about the boundaries of the exhibition, “Each artwork turns into the ghostly reflection of its neighbor, making it impossible to distinguish hosts from guests, friendly creatures from menacing shadows.”

Cattelan, who was on hand for the summery party that opened the exhibition, also makes an appearance at Joannou’s art-filled villa, where visitors to a festive dinner celebrating the DESTE show met the ghost of John F. Kennedy in the form of Now (2004), a life-size rendering, in polyester resin, of the popular president in a casket.

As the parade of high-profile guests rambled by, including a fascinating trio of young women from Bahrain, whose couture outshone even the tattooed presence of Ashley Bickerton relaxing on a streamlined sofa near one of his paintings, the gravitas of Joannou’s annual event in Athens sunk in.

The annual Joannou tradition has longer legs this year than in past, thanks to the debut of Slaughterhouse, a new DESTE Foundation project space on Hydra, the fabled Greek island two hours by hydrofoil from Athens. ARTINFO took a trip out to Hydra for the space’s inauguration on Tuesday with the Bahrain women; a flock of artists including Sue Webster, Tim Noble, Bickerton, Cattelan, Fischer, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Wekua, and probably the ghost of Duchamp; and a coven of major art collectors and advisers, from Miami’s Don and Mera Rubell to New Yorker dealer Jeffrey Deitch, a longtime Joannou adviser.

The space is located in a former slaughterhouse where the island’s goats would meet their fate. Local legend has it that the blood of the animals coursed down a long funnel to the sea below, attracting sharks who slurped up the runoff. That history, plus the myths of Artemis and her golden bow, sunken ships, buried treasure, and local religious lore, gave Matthew Barney and Elizabeth Peyton, who kicked off the space with a first-time collaboration, plenty of raw material to work with.

“Blood of Two: Matthew Barney and Elizabeth Peyton” unfolded with a dawn procession attended by several hundred bleary-eyed pilgrims, including Thomas Struth, who photographed the unfolding Fellini/Bergman/Tarkovsky–like scene from a death-defying, rocky outcropping overlooking Mandraki Bay in the beautiful Aegean Sea. In the almost hallucinatory early light, a fishing boat outfitted with a hoist and black-suited divers brought up a sunken bronze vitrine/sculpture, which contained reliquary-like drawings made by Barney and Peyton.

In reference to the islands' annual Easter rituals, in which an icon representing Christ is carried into the sea, at least six local stevedores took over, grunting their way up ancient steps with the table-sized sculpture  (a punishing route from the sea to the roadside) and meeting up with the bedazzled, or hungover, foreign assembly.

In carefully orchestrated movements, a tarp was unfolded, and the not-so-fresh corpse of a dogfish, actually a small type of shark that travels in a packs, was placed on top of the sculpture and lashed down.

The procession then continued to the Slaughterhouse, where the sculpture was installed and its elaborate fittings removed for viewing. The dogfish, smelling oh so foul, was later roasted on a spit almost beyond recognition. Surely (or one hopes) no one dared eat it. The exhibition runs until spring 2010. Suffice it to say that more will be heard about the Slaughterhouse, which DESTE is rumored to have leased from the Hydra municipality for 30 years.

A bit later, Joannou and his wife, Lietta, hosted a grand breakfast celebrating the new project in their Hydra summer home, high over the protected harbor. Like his boat named “The Guilty,” which is tied up in the harbor below and boasts an exterior designed and painted by Koons as an homage to Roy Lichtenstein, the Hydra home is filled with smaller-scale works by some of Joannou’s favorite artists, including a suite of 40 lithographs by Noble and Webster in the master bedroom that interpret The Joy of Sex, the classic ’70s best seller.

As the guests filtered out, the sights and sounds of the Slaughterhouse procession faded, and the normal retinue of sun-worshipping and sea-seeking tourists once again took over.

Judd Tully is Editor at Large of Art+Auction.