In a lengthy interview published this week by the German publication Der Spiegel, curator Klaus Biesenbach addressed his decision to leave the American art scene for the one in Germany, where he now serves as director of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.
He appeared to attribute the decision to what he described as “political correctness” in the US, where he had served as artistic director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles prior to his departure in 2021. He directed MoMA PS1 before joining MOCA.
“For several years now, everything in the museum world has revolved around DEI, as it’s called in American [English],” he said. (All quotes from the interview have been translated through Google Translate.)
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Seemingly referring to his work at both PS1 and MOCA, he then claimed that he was “one of the first to show more art by women than by men, or one of the first to exhibit Black artists. Because they are great artists who were overlooked for a long time. But then it became unbearable. Everything became a quota requirement. Only certain words were allowed to be used.”
He described his experiences during the pandemic and the first Trump administration, which he said “became a culture war ordeal.” By way of example, he mentioned internal Zoom conferences held following the 2020 murder of George Floyd by the police in Minneapolis.
“In one of our Zoom meetings,” he told Der Spiegel, “we mourned together. The cameras were turned off for 20 minutes in between because people were crying. This developed into a weekly ritual. Everyone was supposed to talk about the discrimination they had experienced or about the reasons why social justice was important to them. I preferred not to participate; it seemed inappropriate for me, as a privileged white man, and especially in the position of director, to be involved. But it was made clear to me that my contribution was expected.”
His contribution was a narrative from his teenage years. “I grew up in a small town in Germany with knowledge of the Holocaust. As a 19-year-old, I spent a summer on a kibbutz in Israel with the Action Reconciliation Service [for Peace, a German organization founded to confront the specter of Nazism after World War II]…. afterward, I realized I no longer wanted to be German. A colleague at the museum thanked me for my account. Then she accused me of missing the point.”
Biesenbach, who continues to hold dual American and German citizenship, also addressed the resignation of Gary Garrels, formerly senior curator of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Garrels left his post in 2020 after he had reportedly used the phrase “reverse discrimination” to describe the deaccessioning of works by white men. “None of us cowardly museum colleagues in the US—myself included—made a peep,” Biesenbach said.
Although he did not address it outright in the interview, Biesenbach garnered controversy during his short MOCA tenure, during which there were two high-profile resignations. A seniror curator at the museum, Mia Locks, resigned, claiming that the institution was “not yet ready to fully embrace” her diversity initiatives. And the institution’s human resources director also departed, claiming a “hostile” work environment.
In 2021, the museum restructured its leadership, switching Biesenbach from director to artistic director and naming Johanna Burton as executive director. Biesenbach’s defection to the Neue Nationalgalerie was announced just a week after the restructuring was made public.
Yet even in Berlin, Biesenbach has continued to be a polarizing figure—particularly for the events surrounding last year’s opening for the Neue Nationalgalerie’s Nan Goldin show. Goldin read a statement in which she called Israel’s military action in Gaza a “genocide.” Then Biesenbach publicly rebutted her speech, following words with a text of his own in which he said, “Israel’s right to exist is beyond question.”
Biesenbach told Der Spiegel that he never made any attempt to keep Goldin from speaking, but he admitted to being “shocked” by the bitter response that evening. “I never would have thought Nan would be so cold. That she would go through with it like that,” he said. He claimed that he “hardly spoke” to Goldin afterward, in what he described as “high-level diplomacy,” and then recounted an alleged encounter with her at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in which people “cried and hugged” him for his speech while Goldin “sat there,” unmoved.
Some have claimed the cancelation of shows and programs for pro-Palestine artists in Germany is evidence of censorship. Biesenbach also appeared to address those allegations: “I had to listen to people from the US say that things were really crazy in Germany. That things would start again like in the 1930s, when it was also dangerous to express one’s opinion.”
Biesenbach used to be polarizing for less explicitly political reasons: he was accused of using museum resources to cozy up to famous people with shows such as the Museum of Modern Art’s 2015 Björk survey. He told Der Spiegel that the “shitstorm” raised by that show was one reason he infrequently gives interviews and has made fewer efforts to align himself with celebrities more recently. “I’ve been practicing restraint for a long time.”
