Dr Frederick Schmidt

I'm a visual anthropologist working with the notion of artistic and social form. I have been working in Athens since 2015, and have a wide network of artists and cultural producers in the local scene. My research interests span artistic pedagogies, contemporary art worlds, and artistic and scientific knowledge about the environment. 

My PhD, Un/Contemporary Arts: Norms and Forms in a Greek Arts School (Cambridge 2026) was an ethnographic study on the production of art and the reproduction of artistic selves in Athens. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, my PhD centred on the prestigious Athens School of Fine Arts and the question of how one becomes an artist in Athens today. 

Ever since the so-called Greek crisis (2009-2018) and documenta14 in 2017, there has been pronounced interest in the Greek arts scene as an example of extraordinary creativity and resilience in the face of adversity. In the PhD, I focused instead on the traditional pedagogies that persist in the School’s notorious entry exam, which to this day takes the form of a five-day live charcoal sketching exam with no written or interview component. My PhD was a study of artistic skill, the transmission of tradition, and the notion of artistic form that is taught in preparation for the exam, but also how these more traditional ‘un-contemporary’ arts relate to more contemporary practices of working artists. 

In the PhD, I traced this un-contemporary method back to the foundation of the Athens School of Fine Arts under the Bavarian King Otto I after independence from the Ottoman Empire. Building on this technique, I developed what I call a "found formalism" to examine the interaction between artistic forms and social forms, tracing the concept of form across different artistic practices (from charcoal sketching, video work, social media practices, to choreographed performance works) and the social situations they speak to (questions of classed reproduction, colonial histories, gendered abuse, and the longue durée of the economic crisis). 

Methodologically, the PhD was based on my own experience preparing and taking the exam in 2021 (unsuccessfully). Sketching became a research method, and my apprenticeship to this form of art-making became the conceptual basis for my wider engagement with Athens's artistic scene. Across the PhD, I made the case for a return to form in anthropological analysis.