It’s Saturday night at Dust Gallery, and I’m at the opening of an exhibition of wall-mounted sculptures of plywood and cardboard painted in pastel colours by Los Angeles artist Patrick Nickell. A small crowd mills about the glass-fronted loft space with its high ceilings, white walls and concrete floors, chatting and sipping white wine as the sun’s dwindling light pours in. On the metal shelving in the open office sits an emblem of hipster art: a colourful graphic sculpture by Japan’s answer to Andy Warhol, Takashi Murakami.
I may be in the middle of the SoHo Lofts, the name of the new condo-loft development where Dust resides, but I’m about as far from Manhattan – geographically and culturally – as you can get within the U.S. My first clue: At Cupid’s Wedding Chapel, a few blocks from here, Elvis-themed nuptials will set you back a mere $399. And as I wait for a cab back to my megahotel, the Wynn, I marvel at the sheer magnitude of this city’s myth-making abilities. This little desert railroad town, in the space of about 100 years, has become a city of some 2 million people that attracts 40 million visitors each year. In the self-appointed entertainment capital of the world, the art that flourishes above all others is that of persuasion. Be it volcano, roller coaster or shark reef, if they build it in Vegas, people will come.
But I’m looking for something here that popular opinion says is particularly un-Vegas: not kitsch or camp (though the Liberace Museum is glorious, like an exploded sequin-wrapped disco ball), not the Strip’s Disney-style eye candy, as magnificent as it is, but Serious Art.
At First Friday, a monthly event that goes down in the Arts District, I watch Las Vegan families strolling and munching corn on the cob, while art students sip beers from plastic cups and check out the galleries. The Arts District keeps it real – sometimes too real – with its boarded-up storefronts and thrift shops. But it feels good to walk around a part of town that’s not trying to be something – ancient Egypt, Paris – that it’s not.
Stepping out of the glare of the blazing midday desert sun into the cool white Modernist complex of the Las Vegas Art Museum (or LVAM), I’m hit by an icy blast of air conditioning. (I am learning that there are two temperature settings in Vegas: stultifying desert heat and casino-chilled.) The LVAM, which shares space with the Sahara West community library in the upscale suburb of Summerlin, is the only fine art institution of its stature in the city and is doing so well that it’s looking for a new home in order to accommodate its growing collections. On my visit, I take in British artist Paul Morrison’s black and white graphic-style paintings and Argentinian-born, Miami-based painter Victoria Gitman’s photo-realistic paintings of beaded purses.
“This city is a masterpiece of entertainment design, which doesn’t necessarily clash with contemporary fine art.” – Libby Lumpkin, director, LVAM
“Vegas is at the very bottom of the cultural destination list, but it doesn’t have to be,” Libby Lumpkin, art critic and director of the LVAM, tells me as we walk through the airy galleries of the museum. “This city is a masterpiece of entertainment design, which doesn’t necessarily clash with contemporary fine art. I think we’re witnessing the birth of this intermingling, where good design – and art and architecture – meets Vegas-style spectacle, and out of this will come new styles.”
Lumpkin was the one who helped billionaire Vegas developer Steve Wynn snag a litany of masterpieces, spanning Old Masters to Pop, from Rubens to Pollock. (Unfortunately, Wynn is also famous in art circles for accidentally jabbing an elbow through one of his Picassos.) “Steve got some incredible bargains that didn’t seem like bargains at the time,” she says of her ex-boss. “He really sparked the trend for collecting in Vegas and stimulated the market worldwide.” Suddenly, casino heads and hoteliers began assembling heavyweight collections, and the art world sat up and took notice.
Offering a window into a make-believe world where the party never ends, the waves of development that are hitting Vegas have also quietly (and sometimes loudly) contributed to the art scene. The Union Park development next to downtown will include Frank Gehry’s wildly sculptural Lou Ruvo Brain Institute and the Smith Center for the Performing Arts, the city’s first-ever performing arts centre. And MGM Mirage’s sprawling LEED-certified CityCenter, an $8-billion multi-use project being built on the Strip, was designed by Daniel Libeskind, Norman Foster and Cesar Pelli, among others, like a starchitectural hedging of bets.
“I think CityCenter’s going to fuel cultural tourism here the way the Guggenheim did in Bilbao or Millennium Park did in Chicago,” Michele Quinn, the curatorial advisor for CityCenter’s collection, which has a $40-million art budget, tells me. Quinn’s new fine art advisory office is a peach-coloured bungalow on a residential street a few blocks north of the Arts District. German photographer Vera Lutter’s black and white negative-style photos of cityscapes and monuments hang on the sand-coloured walls, while out back there are white leather benches and a pebbly courtyard.
The nine-metre Arturo Herrera in the lobby of THEhotel at Mandalay Bay was one of Quinn’s first acquisitions, and for CityCenter, she’s commissioned work from contemporary heavyweights like Jenny Holzer, Nancy Rubins and Richard Long, in addition to acquiring large-scale works by Frank Stella and Claes Oldenburg. For Quinn, like so many others, Vegas has been a land of opportunity. “Would I have had the chance to work with these people in New York? I don’t think so,” she muses about her gamble in moving back to her hometown after living in Manhattan for many years. “I probably would have been at some nice medium-sized gallery.”
But Vegas doesn’t know from “nice” and “medium-sized.” At the entrance to Madame Tussauds interactive wax museum at the Venetian Resort, I watch two elderly women in Bermuda shorts wrap their arms around a wax effigy of Whoopi Goldberg. Though the Venetian’s Guggenheim Hermitage just closed its doors after seven years, a trip to the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art – where I catch the American Modernism exhibition, featuring works by Georgia O’Keeffe and Arshile Gorky – confirms that even on the Strip, small pockets of art can take root and miraculously survive, like flowers pushing up through the pavement.
At the Bellagio’s Picasso restaurant, there are $30-million worth of the Spanish master’s paintings and ceramics accumulated by Steve Wynn, which were sold along with the hotel to MGM Mirage. Seated beneath Still Life with Flowers and Fruit Dish, lit just so and offset by a small bouquet of flowers that complements its colours, I experience high art as set dressing. Call me an East Coast snob or jaded Montrealer – both jibes have been flung at me by my Alberta-born husband – but the whole dining-amid-the-Picassos concept seems like a gimmick. Until I try chef Julian Serrano’s cooking. Then I catch myself thinking, Is it just me, or do poached oysters with osetra caviar and vermouth sauce taste even better in the company of artistic masterpieces?
As French-born general manager Gilles Kolakowski tells me about the new Bernardaud china dishes, which sport brightly coloured Picassoesque doodles by the chef, an eruption of water and flashing coloured lights kicks off outside, synched to the triumphant strains of Rachmaninoff. On with the show! The young Japanese couple next to me starts taking pictures. The restaurant’s picture windows look onto the Bellagio’s 32,000-square-metre man-made lake and the fountains go off every 15 minutes, which is only normal at this time of night.
SoHo-style art galleries may never eclipse some of Vegas’ more popular pursuits, like gambling, topless bars and Bette Midler concerts. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing. There has always been art in Vegas, from the blinding neon on Fremont Street to the city’s enshrinement of Cirque du Soleil; it’s just too accessible to be deemed as such. The city consumes art and culture the way it does most things: voraciously. In the casinos, time melts like a Dali clock and the fake skies – in fake New York, fake Paris, fake Venice – are always the same shade of twilight blue, the day forever reaching for night. At one point, I find myself looking up at a particularly beautiful, deep, dusky blue sky, thinking, Wow, that’s a good sky. They did a great job on that one. Then I snap out of it and realize that is the sky. The real one. I am looking out the window of a cab on my way to the airport to catch the red-eye home and, lacking sleep at the end of a hectic trip, have lost track of where I am.
Just then, a fuchsia stretch SUV pulls up alongside, the tinted window rolls down, a half-dozen women in party dresses squeal and wave, and I wonder how serious art and culture can grow deep roots in a town where a scene like this is commonplace. Then it hits me: If Vegas can make you look up at the sky and wonder if it’s real or fake, it can do anything.
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