Doubling Down on Art

LAS VEGAS —  The trucks backing into the service bays at the opulent and imposing Venetian Resort offer stunning evidence of an easily derided town embracing both commercial kitsch and cosmopolitan culture.

In the daily mix of deliveries to the Venice-themed Strip hotel--from liqueurs to fresh salmon and blooming roses, from souvenir silk-screened T-shirts to plush, logo-emblazoned terrycloth robes--unmarked trucks under heavy guard recently unloaded three Matisses, works by Chagall, Renoir, Cezanne and Van Gogh, and 130 collectible motorcycles.

Step right up, folks! There’s a new show in town. And where entertainment is an art, now art is entertainment, the level of which not even Las Vegas has seen before.

Masterpieces from the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York are being unveiled for tourist consumption today at the Venetian.

The new Guggenheim Hermitage Museum, just off the hotel’s marbled lobby, is an unprecedented matchup of two artistic powerhouses. The opening also marks the first time that the Hermitage--the world’s largest art museum--has established a permanent presence outside its homeland. On view are important examples of Impressionism, Post-Impressionism and early Modernism, in four rooms constructed of Cor-Ten steel appearing almost as rusty velvet, to evoke a sense of the Hermitage’s 18th century classical galleries.

And that’s only the half of it.

The Guggenheim--led by a director who is the P.T. Barnum of the arts world--is expanding its worldwide franchise by moving into its separate, mammoth exhibition space at the Venetian. In the 63,700-square-foot museum and its 70-foot-high main gallery, beneath a skylight painted as the Sistine ceiling and a permanent, 35-ton industrial crane, the Guggenheim is presenting its critically controversial but hugely popular “The Art of the Motorcycle.” Installed by Santa Monica architect Frank Gehry, and featuring chain-link curtains and mirror-like stainless steel backdrops, it depicts the technological, artistic and cultural evolution of motorcycles with the display of more than 130 examples, dating to an 1868 model powered by a steam engine.

The show, initially presented in New York, has been seen at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and at the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain. Serious art critics scoffed, but their voices were lost amid the clamoring customers who lined up to view the exhibitions and voted their approval with their wallets.

Both the smaller Guggenheim Hermitage Museum, called the “jewel box” and initially featuring 45 masterpieces culled from the two museums’ collections, and the larger Guggenheim Las Vegas, nicknamed “the big box” for presentation of large-scale exhibitions, are daring art spaces designed by renowned Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas.

The two museums reflect a $30-million gambit by Sheldon Adelson, who made millions selling his computer convention business Comdex so he could create the Venetian as competition to the Bellagio and the Strip’s other temples to divine decadence. It’s Adelson’s contention that Las Vegas has so matured as a tourist destination that it can credibly attract not just the world’s highest rollers, but its most discriminating art patrons.

For the 7,660-square-foot Guggenheim Hermitage Museum, the hotel is serving as a most unusual landlord; for the larger Guggenheim space, it is both landlord and business partner.

The motives for the convergence of two stellar museums and a Vegas resort are altruistic--bringing masterpieces to the masses--and monetary. Adult admission to each museum is $15, and while the Venetian and the Guggenheim can consider the museums yet another revenue stream, the financially troubled Hermitage is counting on its Las Vegas income to finance long-neglected maintenance of its 2-century-old, 1,100-room facility in Russia, home to more than 3 million objects.

The Venetian is playing off the success of the Bellagio, where then-owner Steve Wynn introduced his 1,700-square-foot Gallery of Fine Art in 1998 as a showplace for his collection of works by Picasso, Van Gogh, Degas, Pollock and others.

After Wynn’s Mirage Resorts hotels, including the Bellagio, were bought by MGM Grand, Wynn kept his personal works, and the new corporate owner sold the hotel-owned works because it had a hard time justifying the holdings to Wall Street. Since then, the space has been used for touring exhibitions--first, Washington’s Phillips Collection and, most recently, works collected by comedian Steve Martin. Because of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 and the resulting downturn in the local Las Vegas economy, the gallery is now dark, although hotel officials say they expect to reopen it after the first of the year, if not sooner.

The Venetian is taking Wynn’s arts initiative to an unprecedented level--not just by Las Vegas standards, but in a way that has triggered derision and applause worldwide.

Can some of the world’s finest art be credibly displayed and appreciated by a camera-toting, T-shirted Las Vegas audience more used to gawking at a faux volcano, a pyramid and scaled-down copies of the Eiffel Tower and Statue of Liberty? These tend to be folks, after all, who spend more time searching through racks of postcards than poring through glossy art books.

What does this say about Las Vegas and its efforts to broaden its appeal beyond iconic showgirls and slot machines? And what does this say about the shifting strategies of curators within the blue-blood world of fine art?

Wynn, for one, says he is thrilled by the opening of the two museums at the Venetian. “The Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art was a personal thing

Various curators and directors of some of the nation’s most renowned art museums declined to comment on what is now showing at the Venetian, each citing the gentleman’s agreement among them not to discuss the artistic decisions of others.

But others are free to reflect on it.

“There is a tremendous amount of anxiety” within the art world, said Richard Koshalek, former director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and now president of Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.

“Given the unusual context of Las Vegas, and the fact that the museums are connected to a casino, it is raising anxiety among museum professionals and artists.

“Are we turning art into a commodity, an entertainment experience?” he asked. “I think this is an experiment. I hope their motives are to present the works with respect and admiration and with an educational purpose behind it. If that’s the case, it’s a bold move, the results of which will be watched with great care by a large number of people in the world of museums.”

Dave Hickey, a nationally respected professor of art criticism at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, is more pragmatic in his assessment.

Adelson and Thomas Krens, the innovative director of the Guggenheim, “are corporate executives in the entertainment business trying to get dollars to the door,” Hickey said. “I’m totally sympathetic to them as long as I get to see the art.”

The idea of bringing the Guggenheim to Las Vegas is credited to Venetian President Rob Goldstein. The notion was embraced by his boss, Adelson, who was emboldened by the commercial success of the Bellagio gallery.

“Let’s not kid ourselves,” Goldstein said in an interview. “This hotel is a building with 10,000 jobs. We are not the Guggenheim or Hermitage. But this city has developed fine dining, fine shopping. We’ve proven on every front that this city is accepting better quality.

“So why not real cultural institutions?” he asked. “It’s a natural fit. We’re bringing culture to the next level. And it’s not dumbed-down for Las Vegas. This is as good as it gets.”

Krens has suggested that Las Vegas is a perfect fit for the New York-based Guggenheim, whose largest museum is in Bilbao and which also operates smaller ones in Berlin and Venice, Italy.

“Nowhere in the rules does it say you can’t come to Las Vegas,” he said at a luncheon at the Venetian. “What you see here is the evolution of contemporary culture. Las Vegas is all about cultural expression. I can’t imagine many more themes here. The world is ready for authenticity.

“It could be this whole thing will fall on its face, but I don’t think so,” he told the audience. “There’s a great deal of skepticism, but I think it will be replaced by jealousy.”

Las Vegas has nothing to lose and everything to gain in the museums, as it casts a wider net for tourists of all cultural ilk, especially at a time when the industry is at least temporarily suffering because of the public’s fear of flying.

Today’s Las Vegas boasts some of the nation’s most accomplished chefs, upscale boutiques, marbled hotels and extravagant entertainment. What it lacks in home-grown performing arts, it fills with touring shows.

The arrival of the Guggenheim and Hermitage skips a beat in the normal development of an arts city, however. Although one small art museum shares space in a city library, and UNLV has a gallery that features works by acclaimed artists, the city remains a small blip on the world’s arts scene.

The common complaint here, local artists note, is that to sell their works, they must display them in Los Angeles and New York--where they are purchased by Las Vegas art patrons who are not exposed to them locally.

“We don’t have galleries on par with New York and Los Angeles, dealing with serious works,” said Richard Hooker of the Las Vegas municipal cultural arts department. “It’s time for that to happen here. We need important commercial venues that are part of a thriving, dynamic, urban arts economy.”

Also lacking in Las Vegas are art museums sizeable enough to assemble and launch significant shows for national travel.

“We can bring shows here and bring in the catalogs, but we can’t really call Las Vegas an arts center until important, must-see shows originate here,” said Libby Lumpkin, an art critic and assistant curator of UNLV’s Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery who served as the founding curator at Wynn’s Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art.

But for Las Vegas to come of artistic age, she and others say, it would take the creation of a major museum with institutional or significant private funding the likes of which has not yet been tapped here. The Guggenheim Hermitage Museum is considered too small to launch a national road show, and the Guggenheim Las Vegas is more likely to receive shows born at its flagship New York museum than to create original shows here for packaging elsewhere.

But even if Las Vegas has major holes to plug in its art world, it has reason to wallow in the notoriety generated by the Guggenheim and Hermitage arrivals here, of all places.

Hickey noted that while the arrival of the two museums will raise the artistic bar in a town where resort casinos tend to follow one another’s lead, the museums’ presence here is driven by money.

“It’s happening everywhere and is a general sea change in the art world: Art is being transformed into a spectator sport. It’s no longer about the sale of art, but ticket sales to view it.

“The art world doesn’t get excited when someone sells a million-dollar picture, but it does get excited if they sell a million dollars in tickets to see Jackie Kennedy stuff.”

Wynn says he is convinced, given his success at Bellagio, that Las Vegas--its residents and visitors alike--will quickly embrace the new art on the block.

“The world is getting ever more sophisticated, and Las Vegas always has managed to hold on to the bumper and catch itself just in time so it’s not a caricature of itself,” he said. “Every once in a while, some cuckoo person--me, Adelson, Krens--shows up and says, ‘Wait a minute, it’s time to move ahead.’ Las Vegas is very agile--one of the most agile cities in America--and this is another example of that.”

The question is whether the museums will simply tap the interest of the 35 million visitors who--at least until recently--have been coming to Las Vegas annually for other reasons more rooted in debauchery, or whether the presence of high art will be so compelling that it will attract a new breed of tourists who have previously eschewed Sin City.

“Where would you want to see the next great Brancusi show--Pittsburgh or Las Vegas?” asked Lumpkin. “Las Vegas in many ways is an ideal location for viewing the major touring exhibitions.”

Indeed, the demographic of the Las Vegas visitor has already been skewing upward in recent years with the advent of fine shopping and restaurants. Wolfgang Puck and Tiffany are on the Strip, and few turn up their noses at Cirque du Soleil.

“Las Vegas provides an extraordinarily diverse, sophisticated audience,” Lumpkin said. “I’m amazed that people say Vegas is attractive to, oh, people from Nebraska. People come here from all over the world.”

Serious art curators began coming to Las Vegas with the opening of Wynn’s gallery, which displayed works that had been in private collections, away from public view, for years, she noted.

The Vegas buzz has been growing since, said Mimi Gaudieri, executive director of the Assn. of Art Museum Directors.

At a recent meeting of museum directors, she said, “I heard of them making side trips to Las Vegas, more than I’d ever heard before. They wanted to go to check it out and see what it was all about.”

Even the Smithsonian Institution last year hosted a culture-and-architecture study tour of Las Vegas--its first. The tour was so popular that more have been planned.

It might even be time for her family to visit Las Vegas, said Ann Gund of Cambridge, Mass., who with her husband, architect Graham Gund, are art patrons of the highest order. She also serves on the board of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

The two have not previously come to Las Vegas, she said, because they weren’t sure if it was appropriate for their 12-year-old son. But, she said, they’re reconsidering.

“I’m not surprised that the Guggenheim has come to Las Vegas,” she offered. “Tom Krens would like to put a Guggenheim everywhere. He thinks about museums as a business, and I worry about it becoming too prolific, too far-flung.

“But I am surprised about the Hermitage. I would have thought they would have done something in New York or Washington.

“Vegas? Who would have thought?”