Where I Stand — James Mann: High art in Las Vegas

Tuesday, Aug. 1, 2000 | 10:08 a.m.

Editor's Note: In August Where I Stand is written by guest columnists. Today's guest, James Mann, has been curator of the Las Vegas Art Museum since its reopening in the Sahara West complex in 1997. Mann, who also is a poet, previously taught at universities in the United States, Brazil, Argentina and France.

The front-page news that New York's Guggenheim Museum may build a branch on the Las Vegas Strip, in partnership with the Venetian, will vastly accelerate the desert city's ongoing move to a far higher cultural level in visual art. This development dramatically confirms the cultural direction already established for Las Vegas by the Bellagio and the reincarnated Las Vegas Art Museum. Things happen fast in Las Vegas, now even in the realm of fine art. This writer had already figured the sudden division of the former Bellagio visual-art enterprise as a net gain for Las Vegas, replacing one high-art venue with two, and adding variety.

The Venetian's Guggenheim coup now alters that arithmetic considerably, a culturally transcendent step in the megaresort competition of constantly raising the ante in both extravagance and refinement. The truth is that this city's progress toward high art has been virtually inevitable. Per square foot, Fremont Street and Las Vegas Boulevard probably have more artistic culture than anywhere else on Earth. Nor is it all "popular" art culture, some of it being genuinely sophisticated. No other locality's corporations spend as much on artistic imagery as do our giant, decor-themed hotel-casinos, each of which separately identifies itself in this way, at enormous expense of risk capital.

With no observance of cultural chronology, Las Vegas palace-builders have fashioned an urban landscape filled with a cascading chaos of recombined and elaborated building styles that are at once the world's largest, adventurously conceived aesthetic constructions, as well as quite pragmatic self-advertisements. The only artistic hierarchy present is one of swank, not of style, and it ranges freely worldwide, up and down the ladder of cultural levels, to find the imagery incorporated in these, the most massive examples of artistic reinvention in the known world. If Las Vegas has reached an economic maturity causing it to look to higher cultural horizons, this is only a natural step that great cities have always taken.

The basic challenges of art in this new century is that in today's diverse culture, the most competent and valuable art will be that which makes the fullest and richest use of the entire range of culture at all levels worldwide, both past and present. A serious case can be made that Las Vegas' physical reality is already the most outstanding urban example of this new artistic universe, making it the unacknowledged world capital of this new movement in art. That is, in terms of the total surround, the look of the man-made environment, the economic climate that embraces art and colossally projects and objectifies it.

Astoundingly, the Las Vegas Strip, and yes, the Fremont Street Experience, now stand as existing, worthwhile models for the unlimited exploration of artistic resources, from the widest possible range of cultural origins and levels. Without prescriptive and prejudged design principles, new Las Vegas building maintains an objective openness to all possibilities of artistic expression, improbably making its host city the most eligible to step forward as current exemplar and future exhibition headquarters of the new, world movement in art.

How can further Las Vegas entities participate in this brave new art world, without spending tens to hundreds of millions of dollars? Simple. They can establish venues and exhibit new or recent work by artists not yet famous or expensive. That's where most of the action is anyway, on this new century's new artistic frontier. Ambitious new venues can buy and/or exhibit such work for a few thousand, not a few million dollars, and can build collections of world importance, practically on a shoestring. All they need is determination, a little cash and informed advice. Las Vegas is the world's most unconventional city. As it now dives on a grand scale into exhibiting and acquiring great art, both old and new, why shouldn't it be equally daring and unconventional in the ways it pursues and achieves this goal?