Making the case for pleasure: independent curator Dave Hickey has shrugged off the identity politics and predictable artist rosters that often dominate international exhibitions to turn SITE Santa Fe's fourth biennial into an ensemble show that is suave, smart and eager to please

Here are the two best quotes I came away with from the opening weekend of "Beau Monde: Toward a Redeemed Cosmopolitanism," SITE Santa Fe's Fourth International Biennial, curated by Dave Hickey. The first comment is from Nic Nicosia, one of the participating artists. He said, "I feel like I'm in the final scene of Star Wars." The second comes from another writer covering the event, who commented, "There are things here that would look good in an airport." Now to put those remarks in context.

Nicosia's Star Wars fantasy occurred every time he crossed the wooden ramp that leads to the entrance of the renovated warehouse that is now the exhibition space of SITE Santa Fe. The ramp, wide enough for five people to walk abreast and banked by steeply angled beds of large blue and yellow artificial flowers, is the work of Graft Design, a Los Angeles-based German design team brought in by Hickey to work on the exhibition. It was the first not-so-subtle hint that they have completely reimagined the space that six years ago was renovated by Richard Gluckman to suit the haute industrial neutrality favored by the international art world. (SITE Santa Fe is considering retaining some of Graft Design's modifications of the interior after the biennial closes in January.)

The exterior of the building has been further transformed by Jim Isermann, also of Los Angeles, who created a snazzy facade of 750 vacuum-formed plastic panels, silver squares with rounded corners that create sharply pointed stars at their junctures. On the adjacent facade, another Angeleno, Gajin Fujita, assisted by Alex Kizu (of the collective K2S Crew) and Jessie Simon (of KGB Crew), has painted an elaborate graffiti tag announcing the exhibition's title and incorporating the nicknames of the participants. Perhaps invoking the final scene of Star Wars is a stretch, but that entrance and that facade produce an undeniable sense of occasion.

When the airport comment came up, I immediately understood it as a compliment. We were standing, two writers with notebooks in hand, at a place in the exhibition where we could see Bridget Riley's Evoe I (1999-2000) and Jesus Rafael Soto's Grande ecriture noire (1979). Both works are mural size. Riley's is a great procession of dark salmon pink and teal arcs that march across a linen field. The angles and curves never quite form a consistent pattern, but they establish a steady and strangely solemn rhythm. Soto's composition consists of thin, vertical white and black lines painted on wooden panels. Geometric shapes formed of thick black wire are mounted on the panels, projecting about 10 inches. When you stand perfectly still, you see an elegant drawing in space. Budge slightly to one side or walk past the piece, and the whole thing writhes. Either work would look great and hold its own in an airport or any bustling public space. That art should be able to do this very thing, and that an art uninhibited in its address to as wide a public as possible is a very desirable art--these are two of the fundamental premises of "Beau Monde."

In my own attempt at quotability, I congratulated Hickey that first day for creating a cheerfully secular exhibition. He accepted the compliment, but I realized that he had misheard me. He thought I'd said "sexual." We cleared that up, and he said that he hoped "Beau Monde" could be both--cheerfully secular and sexual. I had in mind the exhibition's devotion to the here and now, its celebration of wit and crisp design, and the way it neither yearns for nor panders to any sort of vaguely defined spirituality, something Santa Fe is known to dispense by the bucketful. And as for sexual? There is nothing too overt. Fujita's 12-panel painting, South Cali (2001), quotes classic Japanese erotic art, though not in any blistering fashion. Even Jeff Burton's color photographs shot on porn-film sets demur before their subject matter. The sexiness that permeates "Beau Monde" is of a slyer sort. It caresses the lumps and crevices of Ken Price's oversize ceramic sculptures, it effervesces off the feathers of Darryl Montana's Mardi Gras costumes. And when was the last time that pink was the dominant color in so many varied works of art?

So this is Dave Hickey's "beautiful world," an occasion that brings together a wide assortment of well-made and worldly works of art, shot through with a kind of eroticism that leaves a tingle in the atmosphere. And we attendees are citizens of that world, on hand, if not for our redemption, certainly for our pleasure. Hickey always translates "Beau Monde" literally, suggesting a kind of ideal construct. Of course, le beau monde means the social and fashionable set, a step down from the blue bloods to the level that admits writers, actors and artists. It's the international art world. Perhaps by dropping the article, Hickey wanted to sidestep such a connotation, because that's a world he has been famously critical of, especially as it is manifested in the ever-growing list of biennial exhibitions. He's referred to biennials as "trade shows for the curators of museums and kunsthalles the world over." Even more to the point, when he contributed a Best and Worst List to Artforum in 1995, he listed the first SITE Santa Fe Biennial among his worst experiences of the year, evoking images of out-of-towners arriving in Santa Fe to teach the locals about real art.