Category: Curator
Nationality: Swedish
Last Year: 13

‘Biennales’, Daniel Birnbaum told Art+Auction in June, ‘are not
there to be loved. They are there to be discussed.’ Certainly the
Swedish curator’s turn as artistic director of the Venice Biennale
wasn’t universally adored. Some found Fare Mondi/Making
Worlds muted, cerebral, overly reflexive (Diedrich Diederichsen,
in Artforum, discerned riddling ‘Mr Spock art’); Marcus Verhagen,
for ArtReview, conversely praised Birnbaum’s ‘cool and wary
vision of modernity’. Commonly asserted, however, was that the
biennial model as a whole needs overhauling, leaving Birnbaum
– at forty-five, Venice’s youngest-ever director – looking relatively
blameless. And an intellectual regime might have been expected
from Birnbaum, who this year republished his 1992 work of
gastronomic-melancholic theory, As a Weasel Sucks Eggs: An Essay
on Melancholy and Cannibalism (coauthored with Anders Olsson).
In the run-up to Venice, he’d also curated the Turin Triennial and
cocurated the 3rd Yokohama Triennial, and remains director of
the Städelschule in Frankfurt, curator of the institution’s Portikus
gallery and a prolific critic. What Birnbaum knows about eggs,
clearly, is that they’re best divided among several baskets.