apocalypse now; An ambitious curator seeks artists wrestling with the big questions in this year's Carnegie International.

Byline: Dodie Kazanjian

Big international exhibitions of contemporary art-biennials,

triennials, and so forth-are a dime a dozen these days. New ones seem to break out every year, colonizing Johannesburg, Kitakyushu, Dakar, St. Kitts, and other locations once remote from the influence of cutting-edge art. This year's Whitney Biennial was, by common consent, the best in recent memory. And the upcoming Carnegie International-held every three years in Pittsburgh-which predates all of them except the Venice Biennale (both started in the mid-1890s), should turn out

to be a cornucopia of fresh thinking about art's place in post-September 11 society. "I wanted to try a different strategy," says Laura Hoptman, curator of the 2004 Carnegie International.

Instead of presenting a broad survey of the art of the moment, which is what you usually get in these exhibitions, Hoptman has based her show (which runs from October 9 through March 2005) on 38 artists who are grappling with what she calls "the ultimates." "It's about the whys, not the whats or the whos," she says. "It's about artists who are very straightforwardly wrestling with unanswerable issues, like why we exist. They are interested in ethics; some are directly confronting the notion of spirituality, not what spirituality is, but whether they believe or not."

Her roster includes several newcomers, such as Tomma Abts, a young German painter living in London whose "absolutist abstractions," as Hoptman calls them, "are tiny, ugly, wonderfully painted, and enormously unforgiving." Also on board are Robert Breer, age 78, an almost forgotten kinetic sculptor and pioneer of experimental film animation; Peter Doig, a Scottish-born painter of mythological scenes that exist outside normal time and space; and Maurizio Cattelan, the Italian conceptual artist who stunned Milan a couple of months ago by hanging realistic effigies of three children from the branch of an ancient oak tree in the center of town. The show features mini-retrospectives of Robert Crumb (diabolically raw cartoon drawings) and

of Mangelos (Dimitrije Baystiycevicc), a brilliant, little-known Croatian conceptualist who died in 1987, and also an in-depth survey of the later sculptures and drawings of Lee Bontecou, whose ongoing retrospective is now at the Museum of Modern Art.