After curating the Venice Biennale to record-breaking attendance in 2009, Daniel Birnbaum has had a homecoming year: in 2010 he took up the directorship of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm and its orange-clad new outpost in Malmö. The move has seen Birnbaum shedding his previous commitments left, right and centre, resigning as rector of the influential Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main and as director of the exhibition space Portikus in the same city this April, both of which positions he’d held since 2001, as well as making an exit from the board of Manifesta, on which he’d sat since 2002. That said, he found time between CV-building to sit on various juries, including Victor Pinchuk’s Future Generation Art Prize and the inaugural Absolut Art Award, which he chaired – and which was won by Keren Cytter, a favourite of Birnbaum’s. And he remains one of the most erudite philosophers to tackle aesthetics and contemporary art practice.