VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
The art-media intrigue continues!
There has been much speculation about who would replace former Armory Show director Noah Horowitz, who was hired by Art Basel in July. Today, the Armory Show announced Horowitz’s replacement in the top job at the fair: writer and editor Benjamin Genocchio, who is currently editor in chief of Artnet News. “Unfortunately, the price of success is opportunity,” Genocchio told the New York Times, which first reported the story. “This is an opportunity that was too good to pass up.” (Update: My colleague Nate Freeman has a rather lively interview him about the news.)
The move from journalism to the market is a somewhat unusual one, though one precedent is Marc Spiegler, who left writing to become an Art Basel director in 2007.
Before joining Artnet News in 2014, relaunching the online art sales site’s media component, which had been shuttered in 2012, Genocchio was editor in chief of Art & Auction, Modern Painters, and Blouin Artinfo.com, where, full disclosure, I worked for him. He is the husband of Melissa Chiu, the director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and the Times notes in its story that The Washington Post recently accused him of cutting sections of her Wikipedia entry that concerned her controversial decision to move the museum’s gala to New York.
With Genocchio stepping down, Rozalia Jovanovic, who has been with Artnet News since the beginning, will be taking the helm of the site as its new editor in chief. (Disclosure: I worked with Jovanovic at the New York Observer.) In a story on Artnet, she said “I am incredibly excited to take on this big responsibility and I look forward to helping grow and guide our immensely talented staff.”