Come On Down.

New Orleans is smaller and poorer than it used to be, as I have confirmed on my first visit there since the floods attendant on Hurricane Katrina obliterated a large part of the city and left much of the rest a mud-gray mess, traces of which aren't hard to find, three years later. I went to review "Prospect.1," the inaugural New Orleans Biennial, which represents eighty-one artists from thirty-four countries in about thirty ad-hoc locations, and which took the whole of a three-day sojourn to explore in full. (A car is essential.) Some of the offerings are keenly rewarding, but the best thing about the show is the sprawl, which affords a wide and deep immersion in the city's complicated charms. Be it ever so small and poor, and despite catastrophic displacements, New Orleans can't help but remain New Orleans, which is to other cities what a poem is to prose. The phantasmagoria of high and vernacular architecture, polyglot flavors, omnipresent music, exuberant cemeteries, and geographical unlikelihood, of a seaport largely below sea level, stokes continual wonderment. Desire isn't only a street name there. A municipal tradition of giddy impulsiveness, shadowed by recent tragedy and chronic woes--including a high incidence of crime--has got to many of the invited artists in "Prospect.1." In the friskily hyperbolic words of a review by Walter Robinson, the editor of Artnet Magazine, the show "takes the reprobate scallywag nihilists of the contemporary avant-garde and converts them . . . into goody-two-shoes bleeding-heart believers in the nobility of humankind." You may disdain the frequent sentimentality in the show if you can suppress your own uprushes of sentiment. I could not.

Souped-up biennials and other manifestations of festivalist aesthetics have become routine. "Contextual" practice has proved, after sufficiently abundant experience, to be long on con and short on text. "Prospect.1" is unexceptional on this score, but with a pointed and refreshing candor. Featuring few big names and nary a masterpiece, it is my favorite biennial since the nineteen-eighties, when biennials ceased to be innocently serious roundups of recent art and became heavily engineered spectacles. The show's curator, Dan Cameron, a veteran in the field, put it to me flatly: "I'm a tourism promoter." Contemporary biennials are machines for bringing people to places, funded by parties with vested interests in the migration. In this case, the state of Louisiana contributed what little it could, amounting to about eight per cent of the $3.5-million budget. Corporations chipped in twelve per cent. The rest has come, or is confidently anticipated (Cameron says), from foundations and individuals, bucking the current global tide of financial contraction. The trick is to have a place that speaks, and seduces, for itself, and to select art and artists congenial to it--rather than, in the more common vein, to advertise the host city (Sao Paulo, Kwangju, Istanbul) as a cookie-cutter capital of new pep and future prominence.

In the vast meadow of shoulder-high grasses and volunteer saplings, curiously gridded with narrow streets, that is most of the Lower Ninth Ward today stands the intensely purplish brick shell of the Battle Ground Baptist Church, since 1964 the home of a congregation displaced from a razed neighborhood in St. Bernard Parish. Inside, there's a big, diamond-shaped, welded-steel basket filled with weight-lifting equipment, surrounded by freestanding walls that function as bulletin boards for community announcements and appeals. Loudspeakers broadcast a strident overlay of snatches of music and, among less identifiable elements, speeches by Martin Luther King, Jr. This installation, "Diamond Gym," is by Nari Ward, a regular participant in international exhibitions. Its jury-rigged, aggressive form and rather forced symbolism--bodybuilding gear for an enfeebled populace--are familiar qualities of art in biennials, where artists, abetted by curators, strain for immediate impact among competing works in cavernous halls. But here the inchoate ambition to engage viewers succeeds. Those tacked-up, mutely urgent signs and flyers, along with the soundtrack's arousing noise, project the once and future vitality of a culture temporarily paralyzed. Ward puts art in service to something that is, declaratively, more important than art. Emerging from the church into the surrounding ...