Rebranding a City
Though two years have passed, the New Orleans cultural scene is still suffering from the impact of Katrina. While the New Orleans Museum of Art has seen its membership rebound and fundraising increase since reopening in March 2006, even with the 2006–07 blockbuster "Femme: Paintings of Women in French Society from Daumier to Picasso from the Museums of France," an exhibition organized by the French government to help the museum recover from the storm, visitors from outside Louisiana remain remarkably few.

"The show brought in about 80,000 people—probably half of what it would have attracted before Katrina—and only about 15,000 came from out of state," said NOMA director John Bullard. "Normally during a blockbuster, 75 percent of our total attendance would come from out of state."

Many in the New Orleans art scene are betting on Prospect.1 to remedy these sorts of statistics, which are echoed at institutions across the city. The community is hoping for “an Art Basel effect," with the vitality, glamour, and economic largess associated with contemporary art drawing an elite class of tourists to the city, as the Miami fair does every year. But whereas Miami is hip and thoroughly modern, many potential visitors have previously known New Orleans only as a quaintly backward-looking, 19th-century center of jazz, food, and great antiquing, not contemporary art.

To overcome that preconception, the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau is launching a massive campaign to shift the perception of the city in the minds of potential visitors. While the details have yet to be finalized, CVB president Stephen Perry said that the push behind Prospect.1 is part of a larger rebranding of the city as a location that straddles old and new. The campaign’s punning slogan is "Forever 'New' Orleans."

Plans are also in the works for targeted marketing at major annual events, including high-profile fairs such as Frieze, Art Basel Miami Beach, and the Armory Show. "I think the net effect of this [biennial promotion] is going to be a surge of leisure-side, high-end visitors from all over the world," said Perry.

Ambitions Beyond Tourism
Some New Orleans observers are hopeful that the biennial's impact on the city will not only bring a surge of outside interest but also fundamentally reshape the city's sizable indigenous art scene. "We have a long-established art scene here, and visitors in town for the biennial are going to see what the galleries have to offer," said Jonathan Ferrara, an artist and dealer who opened his first New Orleans gallery 12 years ago. And Ferrara wants that encounter to be more substantive than a simple three-month peak in sales every two years.

"I think what the biennial will do is make introductions between New Orleans artists and gallery owners and artists and gallery owners from all over the world," he said. "It will facilitate future exchanges."

In his estimation, those channels into the global contemporary art world, coupled with the low cost of living compared to other important art cities, will attract more emerging artists to New Orleans, a trend that had already begun before Katrina scattered many of them across the country.

From his position at the CVB, Perry shares this ambition, and he sees the growth of the city's talent pool bringing more creative professionals to the city as well. "I think you're going to see New Orleans reborn as one of the bohemian capitals of the world again," he said.

At NOMA, Bullard is more measured but no less hopeful in his assessment of the larger benefits of Prospect.1, noting that while New Orleans has always been an attractive place for artists to come and live, the biennial will showcase contemporary art as a growth industry within the city's economy. His institution seems eager to take advantage of the potential of the city’s contemporary art scene, having recently imported a New York curator of its own, Diego Cortez, to build up its collection of contemporary photography, and announced plans to hire a full-time curator of contemporary art in 2008.