Checking Out the Prospects

Anecdotally, it sounds like Prospect.1, the biennial art festival that CAC curator Dan Cameron has brought to New Orleans, is a modest success. I don’t hear a lot of buzz nor do I get a sense that there has been a lot of art-oriented tourism coming to town to see it, but traffic is up at the CAC, and that’s something.

I’m going to try to get out this weekend and see what I can see of the exhibits, which are scattered around the city. What I know of sounds interesting with unusual venues paired with big, idea-oriented art installations. In the New York Times, Roberta Smith wrote:

you are rarely viewing artworks in isolation, but rather measuring them against their contexts. On one level the show is a lively competition between so-called site-specific art and portable art objects whose meanings are expanded by their settings. On another, it is a tour of the city’s rich past, recent trauma and often struggling arts organizations.

For other takes, here’s blogger Matt Smith’s walkthrough of the CAC and the show at the US Mint, and another from the Gathering of the Tribes blog. Not surprisingly, Doug MacCash at The Times-Picayune is more or less the last word on Prospect.1.