Columnist Scott Dickensheets: Making sense of twin arts center proposals

Scott Dickensheets

Tuesday, Oct. 13, 1998 | 9:50 a.m.

In what to this frazzled memory is an unprecedented occurance, there are two serious proposals for major performing arts centers on local drawing boards.

The better-known of the two is the drive to establish a performing arts complex downtown, on roughly 10 acres near the Clark County Government Center. It's being led by Nancy Houssels, the grand dame of local high culture. The lesser-known second proposal, forwarded by a nonprofit group calling itself the Las Vegas Performing Arts Center Inc. (LVPAC), is a truly audacious plan: a 2,800-seat concert hall, a 600-seat theater, a 600-seat drama stage and an outdoor amphitheater, all on 320 art-park acres of what is now federal land near Red Rock Canyon State Park, just off the proposed beltway.

Both groups say feasibility studies conclude their facilities are needed. "There are 1.3 million people here," says Jon Carlson, president of LVPAC. "It's becoming cosmopolitan enough. Las Vegas is long overdue for something like this."

Maybe, but it's a telling irony that LVPAC was born in the wake of the community asserting that it didn't need an arts center -- it was put together by supporters of a failed 1994 bond issue that would have sited an arts center in the northeastern part of the valley. Of course, that's old news.

"Since then, there's been a fairly strong sea change in attitudes toward it," says Don Kemp, owner of Music World and one of the center's primary backers.

Like many, Kemp senses a gentle drumbeat in the local Zeitgeist saying, We're on the verge of great things. But as the esteemed Las Vegas jazzman and arts administrator Dan Skea has observed, Las Vegas is always on the verge. The city is regularly buffetted by gusts of cultural optimism, which give way to a prolonged sense of waiting, as if the arts scene is a pregnancy that never comes to term.

Kemp, though, has a modest faith in the populace, and puts the ball in its court. "If people want it, it will happen," he says of LVPAC. If they don't, it will probably fail."

Well, here's a hope that neither of them fail, although my fingers are beginning to ache from years of being crossed. Booming growth or not, I've long questioned the size and passion of the arts audience here. They certainly didn't vote with their arts in '94. And where were they during the recent Gateway Arts Festival, a fine and important event meant to crank a little juice into the downtown arts scene? Not even 10,000 people showed up over three days. You don't have to look hard for portents of failure, just as you can find harbingers of success in the grass-roots efforts of the Arts Factory crowd, Nevada Ballet Theatre and others who haven't given up.

All of which makes testing the wind on cultural issues a chancy business, and I could be way off the mark. Perhaps in the contented pink afterglow of the Bellagio Gallery, we'll say, in unison, "Yes, by God, the arts are exactly what we need. Let's build an arts center! Make that two!" Then we'll band together as a community and raise the money, each of us doing whatever we can -- bake sales, change jars in convenience stores, passing a modest bond issue -- to make it a reality, and good Lord, will you listen to me? I'm babbling! More likely, we'll decide we need an arts center and then wait expectantly for Mirage Resorts to build another casino, hoping it'll have one.

LVPAC is now soliciting letters of support addressed to the Bureau of Land Management on behalf of its land acquisition. I won't be insulted if they get a bagful and prove me wrong.