New Serpentine Galleries CEO Bettina Korek on starting the job during lockdown: 'I just want to get into the museum!'

How long do you need to settle into a new job? Six weeks? Six months? How about nine days? That’s how long Bettina Korek, the Serpentine Gallery’s new CEO, got in the museum before lockdown shut its doors.

As the Los Angeles native acknowledges, this time is “surreal… for everyone”, but it’s especially weird for someone stuck in a strange house, in a new city, with a new workplace she can’t get into and a new team she barely knows. I mean sure, she’s in Mayfair, but it’s not even her flat.

“A friend very kindly offered to let me stay at their place for a couple of weeks when I got here, until I could find a place of my own,” she laughs ruefully, indicating the violet-painted study she’s Zooming from, “so I’m still at my friend’s apartment.”

Korek, 42, comes to Kensington Gardens from Frieze LA, where she was executive director. The fair’s second edition, at Paramount Pictures Studios, took place in February this year — a sort of last hurrah for the art world before everything went dark. Though every art fair is inescapably a massive shop for very rich people, some of the events, such as the Artist Street Fair (in which non-profit spaces and grass-roots organisations set up stalls along the streets of Paramount’s New York film set) seem to indicate Korek’s inclusive modus operandi.

“A lot of my background is working on public and civic projects, producing different kinds of guides for engagement,” she agrees. Her first job after studying history of art at Princeton (she had a “very intimidating thesis advisor, the pinnacle of the critical art world”, encounters with whom left her “traumatised”) was at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).

Eventually she became frustrated by the lack of communication between the city’s art organisations and potential audiences, so she set up For Your Art, a mailing list email detailing fun art stuff going on in LA, which evolved into a producing entity with its own space, inaugurated by a 24-hour doughnut buffet and a screening of Christian Marclay’s The Clock.

It’s this accessibility — serious art and ideas expressed with a sense of fun — that Korek aims to keep up at the Serpentine. “The gallery is there for its visitors,” she says. “How do you deliver [them] a profound yet accessible experience? Connecting with and inspiring people is the most important thing that we do.”

Though this week’s government guidance suggests that galleries will remain closed until at least early July, in some ways, Korek’s new charge is the best equipped of London’s public galleries for this ever-changing time. It already had an active online presence, is one of few galleries championing art made specifically for the internet and recently launched Back to Earth, a “multi-year project bringing together over sixty artist-led environmental campaigns” with artists such as Judy Chicago and Olafur Eliasson, which invites participation online.

Korek steps into big but slightly scuffed shoes at the Serpentine. Yana Peel, the CEO from 2016, was credited with not just maintaining existing support but brokering new, lucrative relationships for the gallery (notably with matchesfashion.com), diversifying its board and its collaborative partners, and embracing technology. And yet, last year Peel departed under a cloud, in response to what she described as a “concerted lobbying campaign” questioning her husband’s involvement in an investment firm that had a stake in a controversial cybertech company.

Korek’s really not up for a discussion about her predecessor’s business interests, but when I mention the unprecedented scrutiny that museums are under concerning from whom they take sponsorship, she stops short of taking the line to which some institutions have stuck — that museums are under financial pressure due to funding cuts. “Everything has to be evaluated on a case by case basis,” she says, noting that the Serpentine’s ethics committee is, intriguingly, “in the process of evolving”.

She cites the Artist Council at the Hammer Museum in LA, “where there was an ongoing dialogue with artists about how they perceive these issues. I think, as a museum leader, we always have to follow artists,” she says firmly. Considering that the campaigning American photographer Nan Goldin succeeded in getting the National Portrait Gallery to hand back a £1m grant from the Sackler Foundation (which funded the construction of Serpentine's second exhibition building, designed by Zaha Hadid and completed in 2013), this could be a significant shift.

Growing up in the Van Nuys neighbourhood of the San Fernando valley, Korek’s earliest experiences of art came via her mother, a graphic designer. “I went to LACMA with my mom, we saw a David Hockney exhibition and it had his canyon paintings. And I was like, ‘I drive over that hill! This is my life!’,” Korek says. She started out at college studying economics but switched quickly to art history — with that terrifying supervisor. “I had a really formative experience trying to impress someone who had a different set of criteria than I did for what it meant to successfully communicate about art,” she says. “We see this all the time. How do we empower people to ask questions? Art can be intimidating.”

She is appreciative of her new colleague, the Serpentine’s artistic director Hans-Ulrich Obrist, for, she says, cutting through that kind of nonsense, not least with his Interview Project, on which Korek has worked with him in the past.

“I think this ability to create a bridge to what’s happening in an artist’s mind has the potential to really affect the way that people see the world creatively,” Korek says. “Sometimes the language around art is impenetrable and difficult, so I’m in awe of the treasures that Hans makes available by getting artists to open up. The personal anecdotes come out, and there’s a potential to connect with each other’s humanity.”

It’ll be a while yet, but for now Korek is Zooming ahead in her little study. What’s the first thing she wants to do when she gets out, I ask. Dinner at the Wolseley? A ride on a double decker bus? A haircut? “I want to get into the museum!”