The modern and contemporary art on the third floor of the expanded Seattle Art Museum, opening May 6, is covered in white paper, like the furnishings in a wintering summerhouse. I recently took a tour with curator Michael Darling.

The moment-to-moment rather than overview approach is a necessity due to chronological gaps in the museum's collection (impressionism, Picasso) that are too expensive to fill, but a necessity with good results. Time proceeds from room to room, period to period; this is not the radical themed hang of Sir Nicholas Serota at the newly opened Tate Modern a few years back. But the connections between objects may be more surprising, thought-provoking, and intimate than at more predictably endowed collections. A quirky Leonora Carrington wall sculpture and Calder's Wall Mobile with Small Yellow Panel may not be as far apart as you thought.

"You really have to have works of a certain ambition in here," Darling said of the cavernous contemporary gallery at the conclusion of the third-floor circuit, if you ride the central escalator. The gallery is in viewing distance of Cai Guo-Qiang's massive flight of rusty-bellied, LED-shooting Ford Tauruses and a happy-face sphere by Takashi Murakami that harks back to Parmigianino (there is also plenty of new mannerism upstairs, near the eye-popping porcelain room). Also in the big gallery, on on opposing walls, are Karen Kilimnik's little horse painting, Dinner, and one of Warhol's Rorschachs. It's going to be fun.

Because everyone is asking, it does seem appropriate to share: Yes, it was awkward to be on the same panel as the critic Matthew Kangas at the Tacoma Art Museum on February 10, two days after my story about him, "Critical Mess," hit the newsstands. I did not breathe in for the first 10 minutes I spoke. We did not make eye contact. We did not say anything to or about each other, except that Kangas called me Susan Sontag (he called P-I art critic Regina Hackett Ellen DeGeneres).

We'd been invited to talk about why and how and whether to put together a Northwest biennial, and Portland writer Jonathan Raymond offered grist. A biennial, he argued, is "an opportunity for mass degradation for everyone," something vulgar, big, authoritative, and not to be missed. This was the point I've been making about the biennial, too: that it was put together as if by vague popularity contest, when what a biennial demands is pigheaded leadership.

This led Hackett and I into my favorite moment of the talk. I said I wanted the biennial to be "the show of Northwest art, the one, IT," and she grabbed the mike to say, "I'm so tired of IT." "Who is doing IT around here?" I asked. Who, I wanted to know, is building a definitive stage set for Northwest art on which we can all act as characters—fitting in, tearing down, serving drinks. No museum or gallery has a show like that. There's little to push against. As Hackett had noted earlier, people keep to themselves in the Northwest. Or they once did.

Listen to Jen Graves' podcast, In/Visible.