NEW YORK—Does the art world need yet another festival? The New Museum of Contemporary Art thinks so and announced today that it is launching a new triennial next year. The first edition of the triennial, which bears the provocative title “Younger Than Jesus,” will be curated by the museum's director of special exhibitions, Massimiliano Gioni, and senior curator, Laura Hoptman, along with Lauren Cornell, director of Rhizome and an adjunct curator at the museum. It will open in spring 2009.

“This will be the first regular international exhibition in New York dedicated to emerging artists,” said New Museum director Lisa Phillips. The city already has the Whitney Biennial and "Greater New York" at P.S.1, which takes place every five years, but the former concentrates on American artists and the latter on New York–based artists.

"New York is missing a truly international biennial," said Gioni. "We want to find the defining factors that shape generational change. We will try to analyze how generations emerge and come to produce work."

Gioni said the first edition of the triennial will center on artists from Generation Y, born around 1980, and that the museum is working with more than 150 colleagues around the world — whom he called "informers" — to assemble it. "We want to reveal the process behind it," Gioni said, and indicated there will be catalogs detailing what went into putting the show together. Referring to the popular online social networking service, he added, “We will compose the Facebook of a new generation.”