Francesco Bonami Announced as 1/2 of 2010 Whitney Biennial Curatorial Team

Carol Vogel announced in the NY Times this morning that Francesco Bonami has been named curator of the 2010 Whitney Biennial and Gary Carrion-Murayari, a senior curatorial assistant on the Whitney staff, will be associate curator. The Italian-born Bonami worked on the Whitney's 2007 Rudolph Stingel exhibition, along with Chrissie Iles and Carrion-Murayari; was, in 2003, the first American citizen to serve as curator of the Venice Biennale (a technicality that must cause a great deal of pain for Rob Storr, who thought HE was the first in 2007); and recently completed a large survey show, "Italian Art Between Tradition and Revolution: 1968-2008" for the Palazzo Grassi in Venice. About Bonami's role in the 2005 Venice Biennale Jerry Saltz wrote, "Bonami's show took one of the most coveted jewels in the curating crown, a top spot in the corporation, and risked it all. He gave up power and granted the art world the choice it said it wanted. Dispensing with the so-called "dictatorship of the curator," Bonami enlisted 11 artists and curators who curated 10 exhibitions and included over 375 artists." Whitney curator Donna de Salvo says Bonami has been thinking about the concept of biennial exhibitions in general. Given his predilection for shaking things up, this will be one to keep an eye on as it develops. And that alone--access to information about the process--would be a big change. In the past, most Whitney Biennials have been kept top secret until the opening, with artists having to sign non-disclosure agreements as part of their contract to be included in the exhibition.

On October 30, 2007 I wrote the following, after hearing Bonami give a talk at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Francesco Bonami gave a talk last Wednesday at SFAI. He is a curator at the MCA in Chicago and is also a freelance curator. His theme was "curator as institutional healer" and he was quite entertaining while making his points. His remarks were aimed at an audience of art students, and so were perhaps more candid and irreverent than what might have been presented to, say, an audience of art patrons. He went on at length about the lack of risk-taking in the new generation (under 40) of curators, calling them "preapproved risk takers," the "Frieze Generation," "rampant cowards." "No risk, no kiss." Under curators like these the museum-as-institution has evolved from presenting controversial and groundbreaking exhibitions such as Marsha Tucker's Richard Tuttle show at the Whitney in 1970--which got her fired, but then led to her founding The New Museum--to bland offerings of exhibition committees composed of equal parts curatorial, education, marketing, and fundraising. Museums are being run on the model of a nuclear power plant, Bonami said, where any mistake or failure is considered a huge disaster. Huge operating budgets require steady income from donors and corporations as well as box office, although admissions comprise a very small part of earned income. A museum with an $18 million annual budget will spend only perhaps $2 million on exhibitions, leaving us all wondering where that other $16 mil is going. When I asked what role he thought the audience played in all this, he replied that the intelligence of the audience is frequently underestimated by the curators and educators in museums.