Editor’s Note: Hawaii’s unique arts and culture scene is the focus of this new column by HuffPost Hawaii associate editor James Cave, the Honolulu Weekly’s former arts and culture editor. Watch for regular reports on everything from architecture and design to contemporary art, music, events — anything that makes our island culture what it is. 

These days, it’s as easy to find an art biennial on a calendar as it is to find Neil Patrick Harris on TV. “Biennial fatigue” is officially a thing now in the art world with more than 150 biennials and triennials around the world, including 10 in the U.S. alone.

Come 2016, with the debut of the Honolulu Biennial from the aptly named Honolulu Biennial Foundation (HBF), Hawaii will join the fray.

The Honolulu Biennial has been a long time coming. Hawaii, after all, has the talent, so why not have something that critiques, celebrates, and evaluates them? Proponents argue that such an event would A) bring in the eyeballs and deep pockets of the world’s cultural tourism elite and B) give our best artists some hard-earned money, as well as — dare I say it — a reason not to move to Portland.

A chalkboard sign marks the entrance to “Chain Of Fire,” the Honolulu Biennial Foundation’s inaugural exhibition.

James Cave/Civil Beat

But for many in the local hipster art scene clerisy a big question remains: Do HBF’s organizers have a unique enough vision to justify adding yet another biennial to the map?

Just What Is a Biennial?

A biennial is an arts event that takes place every two years, with particular focus on the host city itself. An invited curator often brings international artists (and attention) to that place to interact with, connect to, inform and be informed by the local arts community. Modern biennials, which have scattered exponentially around the world since the 1980s, are modeled after the grandaddy of all biennials, the Venice Biennale, which began in 1895 as a sort of response to world expos like those in London or Paris.

“It’s kind of a way of situating a city at the crux of a world conversation,” Jaimey Hamilton Faris, a professor of critical theory and contemporary art at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, told me. Sort of like an international show and tell, and a way for creative nations to size up their competition as well as tackling political issues like post-colonialism, globalization and migration through art.

But biennials also exist to introduce a growing city to the touring masses. “Economically, the trend of biennials is attached to the interest in developing new tourist economies for cities around the world,” Hamilton Faris said. “It hasn’t happened so far in Honolulu because Honolulu isn’t a developing city or economy, it’s a U.S. economy that already has a strong tourist industry with its own developed interest.”

The Economic Impact Mirage

The organizers of the Honolulu Biennial, Koan Jeff Baysa and Isabella Ellaheh Hughes, argue that Honolulu has room to grow as a cultural tourist destination.

To them, the Biennial will target international arts and cultural tourists, attracting, according to Hughes, “the circuit of the contemporary art world: curators, artists, art dealers, critics — basically, the ecosystem that isn’t at all coming to Hawaii (now).”

While it sounds nice — who wouldn’t want Hawaii’s tourism industry to be more diverse? — HBF’s economic argument falls a bit flat.

“It’s kind of a way of situating a city at the crux of a world conversation.”  — Jaimey Hamilton Faris

First off, Hughes pointed me to a 2009 study by market research firm Mandala Research, LLC that shows that 78 percent of U.S. leisure travelers do some culture or arts related thing on their trips, amounting to $192 billion pumped into the U.S. economy. Those numbers being five years old aside, it is hard to connect the dots between tourists who visit a museum on a rainy day to those willing to fly to Hawaii for a 24/7 art extravaganza.

HBF also lists two biennials as inspiration: The 2010 Liverpool Biennial, which was visited by 835,000 people and brought in £27 million, and the 2012 Sydney Biennale, which saw 665,000 people and $56 million.

But HBF expects to see only 30,000 visitors for the 2016 Honolulu Biennial — a fraction of these exemplary cities — and it hasn’t yet predicted how that might translate into dollars. It is also planning a string of events and exhibitions leading up to 2016.

Tone Deaf and Redundant?

There will always be haters, especially with something new, but as HBF becomes more of a reality — its first exhibition, titled “Chain Of Fire,” opened Thursday night throughout Kakaako — more and more local curators, arts professors and artists are expressing concerns that HBF is misreading the local arts scene, both culturally and logistically.

About the former, Trisha Lagaso Goldberg, the project manager for the commissioned works of art program at the Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, had some choice words for HBF. After posting on her personal Facebook page this Blouin ArtInfo article announcing the Honolulu Biennial, she commented: “File under YIKES: ‘Honolulu is a dynamic, urban city in the Pacific, with an active arts and culture scene that has yet to be discovered and explored by the broader arts community.’ HEY HONOLULU ARTISTS + ART COMMUNITY MEMBERS: DID YOU KNOW THAT WE ARE YET TO BE DISCOVERED AND EXPLORED? #colonialspeak #backwardnatives.”

From a logistical standpoint, Gaye Chan, the chair of the UH Art Department, admitted she just didn’t see how a biennial would work in such a small city. “Other cities already have a thriving art scene,” she told me. “Ours is fairly limited and small because the population is small. It’s not the kind of tourism we have.”

It would be fun to have a successful biennial to look forward to and talk about every two years.

I want Baysa and Hughes to succeed. They’ve invited a highly regarded curator from Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum named Fumio Nanjo to helm the 2016 event, and it would be fun to have a successful biennial to look forward to and talk about every two years that challenges our artists and gives them the exposure and reward that many deserve. As James Jensen, the curator of contemporary art at the Honolulu Museum of Art, told me, “The rising tide will lift everybody.”

But if they continue to alienate themselves from the community, local support is bound to disintegrate. It’s more pressure that they have to show their true grit in the satellite programming they’ve planned so far. If they can prove themselves legitimate, hopefully the local naysayers will come around and everyone can participate in one huge group hug.

Honolulu’s Already On the Map

As for being the first international arts fair in Honolulu, it seems to me that Jasper Wong and friends might have already won that race. Pow! Wow! Hawaii isn’t technically a biennial — the street art festival happens in Kakaako around Valentine’s Day every year — but it might as well be.

Since 2011, Pow! Wow! has consistently invited international artists to the city to interact with the community. In addition to the site-specific artworks painted on Kakaako walls (some of which are  intellectual works), there’s an educational arm called the Pow! Wow! School of Music that teaches local musical prodigies by putting them in the same room as pros to collaborate.

What’s more, Pow! Wow! brings international attention to the state, and tons of outside press write about it. According to numbers Wong sent me, 28,000 people came to Honolulu as a result of Pow! Wow! activities in 2014, half of whom were visitors (that’s not accounting for their events and festivals they’ve organized in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Portland, or future projects at South By Southwest, Long Beach, Washington D.C., Tokyo and Singapore).

HBF’s goal is that the numbers of cultural visitors to Honolulu will double over the next 10 years. If they’re going to make that happen, they’d be smart to take a few pages out of the Pow! Wow! playbook. And if HBF can do for contemporary art what Pow! Wow! has done for urban art and street murals, we’re going to be in great shape.

Until then, we have HBF’s first exhibition, “Chain Of Fire” — on view through Nov. 9 in Kakaako — and its correlating programming to see what they’re all about.

And then, I guess we wait.