The international art caravan unpacked its tents in Pittsburgh for a couple of days last November. Jet-lagged and bleary-eyed curators, dealers, artists, collectors, and critics from the United States and Europe toured the 1988 Carnegie International, a gathering of one hundred works by thirty-nine artists, which was presented in a stately progression of galleries at the Carnegie Museum of Art.¹Afterward, everybody took a seat alongside Pittsburgh society in the gold and marble splendor of the foyer of the Carnegie Music Hall for a black-tie dinner. Six hundred and fifty people were at dinner, including more than half of the artists in the show. Wolfgang Laib was among a number of artists who dissented from formal dress. A student of Eastern religions who sports a monkishly shorn head, Laib appeared in a waist-length jacket of what looked like matted orange terry cloth. Julian Schnabel, outfitted in a big splendid waistcoat and cravat—and with his young daughter in tow—had a seat in the balcony, a balcony out of some Tiepolo fantasy of a Venetian costume ball. During dessert there was a roll call of the participating artists, and those seated up in the balcony definitely had a theatrical advantage when it came their turn to take a bow. After that, it was time for the awarding of the Carnegie Prize, which went to Rebecca Horn, a forty-four-year-old German conceptual artist whose entry, an installation called The Hydra-Forest/performing; Oscar Wilde, memorialized the Anglo-Irish author with some ear-splitting sound effects