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Few things can get national media -- let alone international media -- to regard Pittsburgh as something other than a placeholder city between the coasts.

But every four years, our city assumes a brief but unmistakable and well-earned level of prestige as the host of the Carnegie International.

The five-month exhibit of contemporary art gathered under the roof of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Oakland was begun in 1896 by industrialist Andrew Carnegie. It's the second oldest contemporary art exhibition in the world, predated only by the Venice Biennial in Italy.

At Friday's media preview, the 54th Carnegie International proved its drawing power by attracting a cadre of journalists, critics and artists from across the country and around the world, including Japan, Switzerland, Germany and London. CNN had already weighed in with an Oct. 3 story.

"I'm overwhelmed by the thought behind the show," said Marion Lambert, an art collector who had flown with her husband from Geneva, Switzerland. "You look for people who have the same affinity, the same feeling that you do."

Organized over a three-year period by curator Laura Hoptman, the latest International features emerging and established artists. Representing the latter are sculptor Lee Bontecou, the late Croatian artist Mangelos and Philadelphia-born Robert Crumb, whose ruthless and harrowing underground comic art is alternatively sympathetic and savage in its depiction of marginalized losers and the shameful desires of the id.

In the galleries yesterday, foreign languages and accents tumbled over one another -- a French accent purring into a cell phone in one gallery, a discussion in German in another, the atmosphere steeping like warm tea in a pair of BBC-style British accents. The presumptive power couple, art critic Calvin Tompkins of the New Yorker and his wife Dodie Kazanjian, editor-at-large for Vogue, were expected later in the evening.

Canadian art critic Richard Rhodes, editor of Canadian Art Magazine, Canada's largest art publication, studied the cool remove of the canvases of Swedish painter Mamma Andersson. A German television crew interviewed Hoptman as part of a feature on Dusseldorf painter Neo Rauch for an hourlong news program, "Tagesthemen." Producer Daniela Hetz likened the International to Documenta, a biennial held in Kessel in Germany.

"You could wait 10 years to see this concentration of contemporary art in one place," said David Bonetti, art critic for the St. Louis Post Dispatch. "That's extremely valuable if you're going to make judgments about art."

The 54th International features artists whose mandate went beyond aesthetics and sensory stimulation to reclaim its philosophical conscientiousness, Hoptman said in her opening remarks. The 38 artists were chosen for their willingness to address "the ultimates": questions of religion, existence, science and political ideology, she said. Artists were encouraged to expand their vision from the personal to the global, as seen in the collection of more than 500 paintings, objects and installations.

Chien Hui Kao, who makes her home in Chicago, is writing a 40-page piece for Artists Magazine, which has a circulation of 60,000 throughout China and her native Tawain.

Kao covered the 2000 Carnegie International and has written on the Documenta in Germany and the Venice Biennial in Italy for 10 years. "Personally, I like the Carnegie International very much," she said.

"I like the concept," she said, of the International addressing the question of ethics in art. "Other (biennials) can be like a theme park."

Even so, she found this international "conservative," a consequence, perhaps of its tackling the big questions.

Later last night, the visiting media was set to tour the Cultural District and see the performance of "Titanic" on the North Shore, one of the opening events in the Pittsburgh International Festival of Firsts. Kao said she's interested to see whether the renovations and improvements promised by enthusiastic tour guides four years ago have come to fruition.

"I'm curious," she said.

Brian Ripel of New York City is on a two-year odyssey to study biennials. A professor of architecture at Vassar College, he's studying the relationship of art exhibitions with their locations. The Carnegie International is the fifth exhibition he has visited this year.

Ripel also has visited the Venice Biennial, the Manfiesta in Spain and biennials in Liverpool, England and San Paulo, Brazil. He was in town with wife Jean Shin, a sculpture installation artist.

"In the past 20 years, there's been a massive proliferation of biennials," he said, estimating the number at nearly 60. It's almost possible to attend a biennial every two weeks, he said.

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