Journalist and writer Pietrangelo Buttafuoco has been nominated to be the new president of the Venice Biennale, replacing current president Roberto Cicutto, whose term ends in March 2024. The nomination will now be reviewed by Italy’s Chamber and Senate who will deliver an opinion on 14 November. Buttafuoco is closely affiliated with the Italian right: he wrote a book about Silvio Berlusconi described on Google Books as ‘Epic, comic, tragic. Berlusconi as you have never seen him.’ His uncle was the extreme-right politician Antonino Buttafuoco who was associated with the far-right political group European Right, which operated in the European Parliament in the 1980s.
Buttafuoco’s nomination comes within a context of reappointments across culture initiated by the Italian government headed by Giorgia Meloni of the right-wing Fratelli d’Italia party. Italian daily newspaper La Stampa reports that the Venetian Senator Raffaele Speranzon has declared the nomination of Buttafuco for president of the Biennale marks that ‘another glass ceiling has been broken’, arguing that ‘the La Biennale Foundation has been considered by the left as a fiefdom’. Speranzon enthusiastically added that this nomination ‘affirms a change of pace that the Meloni government wants to imprint in every cultural and social center of the nation: only personalities chosen for their depth, competence and authority. My heartfelt congratulations and best wishes for good work go to Buttafuoco.’ The Fratelli d’Italia have already placed a director in place at MAXXI in Rome and at Rai, the Italian public broadcaster. The Venice Biennale Foundation nomination continues this trend of the right-wing party placing its people at the helm of cultural institutions.
