The Irresistible Rise of Massimiliano Gioni: Why the New Museum Is Betting on an Insider

The Art Detective The Irresistible Rise of Massimiliano Gioni: Why the New Museum Is Betting on an Insider 'I wonder why we bothered to have a search—it was a total waste of time and money.' 'I wonder why we bothered to have a search—it was a total waste of time and money.' Katya Kazakina ShareShare This Article Last week, the New Museum named its artistic director, Massimiliano Gioni, to succeed his longtime boss and mentor, Lisa Phillips, as its director. After hiring an “external firm to conduct an extensive international search,” the New Museum’s trustees concluded that—surprise!—Gioni was the best choice for the top job. The search lasted at least eight months, and in the end, every trustee voted for Gioni, who joined the staff in 2006. James Keith Brown, the institution’s board president, praised his “commitment to artists and his embrace of the experimentation, so central to the New Museum’s DNA.” In addition to his new responsibilities, Gioni will continue to oversee curatorial programming, according to a spokesperson. The move reveals as much about the board’s vision for the museum as it does about Gioni, its third leader since its founding in 1977. The trustees elevated one of the best-connected curators in contemporary art, a figure whose influence extends far beyond the museum, thanks to the years he has spent building relationships with key international artists, collectors, foundations, biennials, and other institutions. “Massimiliano is absolutely unique,” art dealer Jeffrey Deitch said. “He’s one of the rare people with academic skill and entrepreneurial drive. And to top it off, he has a very charismatic personality.” The promotion puts Gioni among a new generation of museum leaders who started as curators and rose through the ranks to the top job. In New York, those figures include Christophe Cherix, who took the reins of the Museum of Modern Art in 2025, and Scott Rothkopf at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2023. Farther afield, Esther Bell took over the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, this month. All were internal hires and curators. One way to explain the trend is that museum boards don’t want to take unnecessary risks right now. They are prioritizing continuity over seeking out big new voices by developing their curators into CEOs. “When times are tight, as they are now, both intellectually and monetarily, the decision makers inside institutions pull in, and the people they know well are the ones that they promote,” Richard Armstrong, the former director of the Guggenheim Museum, said. Museums have always worried about finding their next director, but the field started paying particular attention to the leadership pipeline as baby boomers began approaching retirement. In 2011, the Mellon Foundation awarded a grant to the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio to establish a two-year postgraduate program designed to prepare future museum directors and senior leaders by focusing on curatorial and administrative matters in equal parts. (Mariët Westermann, the Guggenheim’s director and CEO, was executive vice president at the powerful foundation at the time.) One of the first fellows was Adam Levine, who later became the museum’s deputy director and then left to run the Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens in Jacksonville, Florida. He returned to be Toledo’s director in 2020, succeeding Brian Kennedy, for whom the Toledo fellowship is now named. This type of direct succession is almost a textbook example of the leadership-development pipeline that the program envisioned. Today, some of the most influential U.S. museums appear to be following the same script by developing future directors within their own ranks. These promotions are not just about continuity, experts say. In a world where fundraising and partnerships are increasingly important to museums’ bottom lines, their leaders need to have more than curatorial excellence and intellectual rigor. Well-established networks are more essential than ever. The New Museum’s press release on Gioni’s appointment makes its priorities crystal clear. It paints a portrait of a cultural diplomat on a global stage. In addition to leading the New Museum’s artistic program, Gioni has spent the past 24 years leading the art-focused Nicola Trussardi Foundation in Milan; he curated the 2013 Venice Biennale; and he organized shows for the Deste Foundation in Athens, Museo Jumex in Mexico City, the Long Museum in Shanghai, Qatar Museums in Doha, and the Aïshti Foundation in Beirut. (Gioni’s involvement with the Trussardi Foundation will end after he’s done with a symposium and a book that were planned before the search for the New Museum’s next director began, according to the spokesperson.) While the section describing these external accomplishments is 199 words long, the one about Gioni’s in-house achievements is shorter, at 176 words. It highlights 28 solo shows, including for Urs Fischer and Faith Ringgold, as well as groundbreaking surveys like “New Humans: Memories of the Future,” currently occupying the museum’s new addition to rave reviews, and “The Generational Triennial: Younger Than Jesus” in 2009. (The museum declined to make him available for an interview.) As always, it’s worth noting what’s not mentioned in the press release. For instance: Gioni’s scholarly publications and some controversies, like the 2010 exhibition “Skin Fruit,” featuring the private trove of Greek collector Dakis Joannou, Deste’s founder, who is a New Museum board member and Gioni’s good friend. For Joannou, Gioni’s directorship was an inevitability. “I wonder why we bothered to have a search—it was a total waste of time and money,” he told me by phone this week. “Some people thought it would be more politically correct to go through these searches. It’s an American thing.” But maybe it was more of a New Museum thing, because the Whitney board didn’t do a full search to appoint Rothkopf, according to his predecessor, Adam Weinberg. He said that he supported his protégé and “was pleased” by the appointment, “but wasn’t involved in that decision.” Finding the right director is one of the “most important responsibilities of a board of trustees,” Weinberg said, adding that he sits on many boards and knows this “from the other side.” There’s a misunderstanding that outgoing directors are involved in succession planning, he said. Phillips, who announced her plans to retire in September, was not aware of what was going on with the search committee, Weinberg said. “Richard Armstrong was not on the search for the Guggenheim. Glenn was not on the search committee for MoMA. Ian Wardropper wasn’t on the search committee for the Frick.” Phillips signed off in April, after 26 years at the helm, having completed the New Museum’s second major expansion that added 60,000 square feet, doubling its exhibition space. The project was funded by a $130 million capital campaign. Gioni, who starts the new job on August 1, now has his board’s blessing to program the New Museum’s 120,000 square feet, a dream for a curator used to working on a large scale. (Though, as artistic director, he was essentially already in control of that programming.) He inherits a museum with a $19 million annual operating budget, 149 employees, 52 trustees, and $120 million in assets, based on the latest publicly available filings. He will need to deal with labor issues and human resources, liaise with government officials and potential corporate sponsors, cultivate trustees, and build global institutional partnerships—all while maintaining his artistic credibility. There are big differences between being the artistic director and the director of a museum, according to former top brass at American museums. Compensation is an obvious one. As artistic director, Gioni’s total compensation was $430,931, according to the latest filings. Phillips made twice as much, $874,548, after a quarter-century in the role. But there are other major differences. “It’s very different being involved with ideas and artists and then being the director,” Armstrong said. “As the director, you’re going to meetings, making HR decisions, and raising money all day—and most of the night. It’s not what we call intellectually stimulating.” When I mentioned this line of thinking to Joannou, he pushed back against it, mentioning that, unlike the Guggenheim and other New York institutions, the New Museum doesn’t have a permanent collection. “It’s like a kunsthalle,” he said. “They have to be run by an artistic director. His job is the programming—plus the administrative duties. You provide him with a proper support to do it.” However, public filings make clear just how important it is to bring in donations. Philanthropic contributions represent the lion’s share of the New Museum’s revenue. During the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2025, contributions and grants amounted to $22.5 million, or 87.5 percent of its total revenue. The New Museum’s 52-person board is unusually large relative to its roughly $19 million operating budget. This results in an average individual contribution of about $365,000 per trustee, based on my calculations. (By comparison, MoMA’s average contribution per trustee is about $5 million.) So, Gioni will have to bring in cash, not just curate. And this is another area where his supporters say that he will shine. “Every time Massimiliano puts on one of his exhibitions, he has to fundraise,” said Deitch, who used to run the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. “His fundraising, it comes out of his relationships with art patrons. You don’t fundraise by sending an email.” Unlike an outside hire, Gioni has spent years cultivating ties with his trustees. “There isn’t such a thing as being too close to trustees,” Armstrong said. “They have to be your closest allies to get you to your goal.” As Gioni prepares to start his tenure next month, the board appears to be solidly behind him, confident in his multiple talents. “All the museums in Europe are like this,” Joannou said. “The artistic director is director of the museum. And Massimiliano has the abilities to control the costs and to manage people. He’s fantastic managing people, always with a big smile, never confrontational. And in fundraising, by the time he’s talking to you, you feel like giving money. He has a great talent for that, too.”