Until last weekend, New Orleans was my American blind spot, the only major city I hadn't explored since I decamped to New York from London a decade ago. What finally dragged me down was Prospect 1, the brand-new Venice-style biennial that's just requisitioned swaths of the city for the first time. Going from the Big Easy to the Big Arty is yet another way New Orleans is synchronizing with Venice. They've long been sister cities: the same decrepit glamour; identically swampy, waterlogged land; and locals who are equal parts louche and eccentric (no wonder Angelina feels so at home here). But this show—81 artists, 38 countries, 22 sites—is its clearest echo yet of La Serenissima. Small green P1 signs were everywhere, touting some gratis show from a local or international name, and the caliber of the work, as well as its scope, was astonishing—even more so for a first-time event in a still-hobbled city.

There's art installed in museums, much of it interactive, like Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's pulse-activated pools and Xu Bing's computer that translates standard words into Lego-like hieroglyphics (both in the New Orleans Museum of Art). Then there are pieces in abandoned but repurposed buildings: José Damasceno's deceptively simple chalk-outlined calculator (inside the Colton School) and Tony Fitzpatrick's OCD-on-LSD collages (at home in a former mortuary).

And, of course, there are site-specific pieces scattered throughout the Lower Ninth Ward, its onetime city streets empty, overgrown, and bucolic enough to make a cameo in a Thomas Hardy novel. In between freshly built Brad Pitt-sponsored homes, handyman-artist Paul Villinski has holed up in his Emergency Response Studio, a witty riff on a FEMA trailer that's a self-sufficient studio-cum-hideout with solar panels for power. Mark Bradford and Robin Rhode even snagged sponsorship from De Beers (pictured), whose pennants, while a little incongruous in the I Am Legend-like landscape, were welcome all the same.