With exteriors designed by Jeff Koons and guest cabins designed around museum-worthy works
There have always been charges of excess in the art world, and Dakis Joannou has one answer to them: Guilty. Docked in Athens’ Piraeus Port, his irreverently named 115-foot luxury craft is a fantastical collaboration between superstar American artist Jeff Koons and Italian yacht designer Ivana Porfiri. Although the colourful exterior brings to mind the Pop paintings of Roy Lichtenstein, Guilty’s bold geometric designs—alternating yellow rhombuses, pink triangles and blue polygons—were actually inspired by British naval camouflage from World War I. But there is no hiding the 72-year-old Greek-Cypriot industrialist’s super-yacht—it is a floating piece of art.
To Joannou, one of the world’s most important contemporary art collectors, what matters most about Guilty is that it provokes a reaction. “We did what we wanted; style was irrelevant,” he says. “We designed a boat in an antistyle method. We have no rules, no programmes, no plans.” Porfiri worked with him to get elements of functionality in place before moving on to Koons’s kaleidoscope design.
Joannou began collecting art in the mid-1980s after having made his fortune expanding his family’s construction empire in the Middle East, North Africa and southern Europe. He saw a piece by the relatively unknown Koons titled One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank, a Neo-Pop sculpture depicting a basketball suspended in a fish tank, and was captivated.
(This story appears in the July-Aug 2014 issue of ForbesLife India. To visit our Archives, click here.)