You could do worse than consider the example of Prospect New Orleans – the sprawling exhibition organised by New York curator Dan Cameron. A long-time lover of New Orleans, Cameron visited the city in 2005 after the catastrophe of cyclone Katrina and set about creating what is now the largest international art exhibition in the USA, a show that, by all accounts, does all the things such shows usually speak of but never achieve: drawing thousands of new visitors and millions of dollars to the local economy, highlighting the plight of many of the city's most neglected corners, knitting far-flung communities together through a kind of city-wide scavenger hunt, and forging a rare alliance of civic spirit, can-do practicality and creative vision.

His show also, in the memorable words of Artnet's Walter Robinson, took 'the reprobate scallywag nihilists of the contemporary avant-garde and convert[ed] them... into goody-two-shoes bleeding-heart believers in the nobility of humankind'. Props!

The work pictured, Window and Ladder: Too Late For Help by Argentine artist Leandro Erlich, was made for the first Prospect in 2008 and recently acquired by the New Orleans Museum of Art.