Generali Foundation

Profile

The Generali Foundation was created in 1988; in 1995, it moved to its new building on Wiedner Hauptstrasse. An important change came in 2007: the decision was made that the Generali Foundation and the BAWAG Foundation would share their staff and infrastructure, starting on 1 January 2008. A service company, called Foundationsquartier GmbH, was incorporated to manage these resources. For the Generali Foundation, sharing its facilities with the BAWAG Foundation means a significant departure from the past; nonetheless, both institutions will seek to preserve their specific identities and operate under their respective independent directors. The Generali Foundation's program of exhibitions and its ongoing scheme of acquisitions remain intact; the collection will continue to expand. The spatial situation merely compels the Generali Foundaion to reduce, for the time being, the number of exhibitions to two per year instead of three, as in the past.

The founding director, Sabine Breitwieser , under whose direction the Foundation has created a collection of conceptual art that is probably unparalleled in the world and presented an uncompromising program of exhibitions, found herself unable to support this solution. This caused an uproar in the media and raised massive concerns among artists who had collaborated with the Generali Foundation for years, concerns that the collection and program of exhibitions would be the victims of budget cuts and that the "fundamental question regarding the contemporary social function of art," a question that had heretofore been consistently pursued, would be supplanted by a program "exposed to rather unrestrained pressure to succeed in catering to mass audiences" (S. Breitwieser, in: Texte zur Kunst 68, December 2007). That critics express such views constitutes an understandable and important reaction, and is the true function of criticism. The media's rush to judgment regarding what would happen next, a judgment that bases its arguments only in part on accurate information, continues, although its tone has become somewhat less strident since I was offered the directorship.