Inside the Venice Biennale’s Curators, a New Oral History Finds Budget Pressure and Reinvention
What does it take to steer the Venice Biennale, the art world’s most scrutinized exhibition? A new book, High Waters: An Oral History of the Venice Biennale, edited by Massimiliano Gioni and published by JRP Editions, answers that question through the voices of 16 of the 17 curators who have led the show since 1993. The lone absence is Germano Celant, who organized the 1997 edition and died in 2020 before Gioni could interview him.
The result is less a tidy institutional history than a portrait of an exhibition shaped by deadlines, diplomacy, and money. Gioni, artistic director of the New Museum and curator of the 2013 Biennale, said he was given about €2 million for his edition and raised another €1.5 million. Okwui Enwezor, who organized the 2015 Biennale, pointed to the same pressure from another angle: the real distinction of Venice, he suggested, is often the budget, or the lack of it.
That refrain runs through the book. Daniel Birnbaum said his 2009 edition, mounted during the financial crisis, received less funding than the one before it. Adriano Pedrosa, curator of the 2024 Biennale, marveled that museums around the world covered shipping costs so works from their collections could travel to Venice for his loan-heavy exhibition. María de Corral recalled an unnamed famous painter arriving with his gallerist, both carrying hammers and nails to help install the work.
The interviews also trace how the Biennale has changed shape over time. María de Corral and Rosa Martínez were the first women to curate the exhibition, after 110 years, and they had just eight months to prepare the 2005 edition. Robert Storr, who later took on the 2007 Biennale, said he had recommended the pair because he needed more time himself. The institution, he and others suggest, has always depended on improvisation as much as authority.
What emerges most clearly is that the Venice Biennale has never had a single purpose. Ralph Rugoff, who curated the 2019 edition, described it as something that must be grounded in its own time, almost like a recording device. Cecilia Alemani, who led the 2022 Biennale, countered that the idea of the show as only a mirror of the present is relatively recent. She noted that the 1948 edition included a survey of Impressionism, which was already historical by then.
Pedrosa argued that there are no rules and that the Biennale should be reinvented every two years. Francesco Bonami, meanwhile, called his own edition the “last” Biennale in the sense of a radically transformative event. Taken together, the interviews suggest an institution that remains elastic, argumentative, and unusually exposed to the conditions around it — a rare exhibition where artistic ambition, political memory, and financial reality are never far apart.
