NEW YORK—Recently appointed Dean of the Yale School of Art, former Museum of Modern Art curator Robert Storr is the first American-born director of the Venice Biennale, which opens June 10. The exhibition's title is "Think With the Senses—Feel With the Mind." He spoke with Sarah Douglas about discovering new talent in China and Africa, the decentralized state of the art world, and the perils of confusing biennials with fairs.

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During the SITE Santa Fe Biennial you curated in 2004, an interviewer asked you, "What have we a right to expect from art right now?" You replied, "What does art have a right to expect from us right now?" How would you answer now?

You can't summarize the art world any longer. There is no mainstream. There is no primary scene. There is no capital. I'm not trying to pick out trends and movements and tell people the future. It's more like saying, Out of all there is, and all the places where art is made, these are some things that are really worth thinking about, looking at, experiencing.

You've said that Venice will make "no attempt to compete with art fairs or handicap the market." Can one really distance oneself from the market?

No, and it would be misleading to say this is not something one has to think about, but you can think about it precisely in order to diminish its impact rather than to try and play footsie with it, or to follow it, or to get ahead of it. The punch line for [an article of mine that appeared] in the Art Newspaper was "Money talks, but it doesn't have much to say about art." There are two aspects of the market that are hard to deal with: One, everybody thinks it is all corrupt and that the only thing curators do is act as pilot fish for collectors or dealers, which is simply not the case. Two, the real liability is that it encourages people to think that there's lots of money sloshing around and therefore biennials don't need to be funded; all you need to do is tap into the market. The perception that biennials are a kind of alternative version of the art fair is very damaging because the sponsors of biennials need to know that they need money to do them properly.

What parts of your show do you think will be most criticized?

I can't be sure. I've been a fairly high-profile person in New York for a long time, and it's about time to have a pile-on. But there's no point in having a reputation unless you are willing to spend it; you can't take it with you. Now is the moment for me to try some things that are not sure-fire. I'll try to give people something that isn't a waste of their time, and critics can say what they wish. Since I know about 90 percent of them, I can predict a few things right away. It would be interesting, actually, if the critics weren't so predictable.

You've spoken about going in search of the unfamiliar for this biennale. Can you name a few artists that were real discoveries for you?

In Shanghai, I went to the apartment of a young artist, Yang Zhenzhong, and his wife. He showed me a video that was very simple: You see a person's face appear, and, looking at the camera, it says, "I will die." That's it. In two languages. You get old people, young people, people who laugh nervously when they say it, people who seem to be registering what it means in different ways. I said, "I really want to show this in Venice." And he said, "I want to expand it." So he did it in 10 languages. So there are 10 videotapes of many people stating a simple truth, but in ways that are resonant. There is also a comic book by two African artists, Eyoum Ngangue and Faustin Titi, about the boat people of Senegal's attempts to get to Spain. It's called An Eternity in Tangiers, because the principal person in the story gets stuck there. So their work will be comic-book pages displayed on a wall. Beautifully drawn and very straightforward and poetic, they encourage "feeling with the mind."

You have said, "I think both politics and art are ill served by bad political art."