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The Politics of Museum Joy

The Carnegie International, the signature exhibition of the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has two salient dates of birth: 1896 and 1991. Held every four to five years, the International adopted its current form in 1991, when the museum invited outside curators Lynne Cooke and Mark Francis to co-organize the exhibition. This model of the independent or outside curator overseeing large-scale, international exhibitions became increasingly widespread in the 1990s, concurrent with the rise of curators from anonymous museum staff members to their current status as legitimate art stars. The decade marked the beginning of an explosive proliferation of biennials and triennials, creating a globalized art world traversed by nomadic artists and curators.1 At times, mega-exhibitions fell into the trap of supplanting cultural specificity with a monolithic global art-world elite—the same artists and curators on a seemingly endless world tour, creating what the scholar of curatorial practice Paul O’Neill has described as a “global white cube.”2 Yet some mega-exhibitions did real work to dismantle traditional hierarchies that privileged Western art, without romanticizing or fetishizing art practice in developing countries. Okwui Enwezor’s Documenta 11 (2002) was exemplary in this regard: taking place beyond Kassel, throughout five international “research platforms,” it built the groundwork for a truly postcolonial politics of curation. While the current format of the International is rooted in the relatively recent expansion and so-called biennialization of the art world, as an event the exhibition is much older. With its first iteration in 1896, the International—then simply called the Annual Exhibition—is the oldest recurring survey of contemporary art in the United States, and second in the world only to the Venice Biennale, founded in 1895. One year after the Pittsburgh industrialist Andrew Carnegie founded the Carnegie Institute—a museum