Thursday, Sept. 19, 2002 | 8:20 a.m.
When Thomas Krens, director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, announced he intended to open the Guggenheim Las Vegas and the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum, it was hard to hear the pronouncement over the guffaws of fellow museum directors and the national press.
Las Vegas as a cultural icon is just too easy to lampoon.
Despite the financial success of Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art and The Rio's long-gone Treasures of Russia, contributing New York Times Magazine writer Deborah Solomon sounds shocked just shocked! in a recent article that Krens is "also responsible for Guggenheim offshoots in ... of all places, Las Vegas, where in October The Venetian unveiled two ambitious art museums in a setting that includes loudly singing gondoliers paddling along indoor canals."
To the cultural elite, there just seems to be something inherently immoral about flitting from a Cezanne masterpiece to a gondolier poling along a fake canal.
"Anyone who breaks from tradition is going to get bad press," responds Marianne Lorenz, executive director of Las Vegas Art Museum. "Krens must have skin as thick as an elephant."
Krens' foray into Las Vegas may have been inevitable, however. Both Las Vegas and the museum director continue to irritate cultural critics by not doing what is expected. And they do so with an aplomb that can't help but engender a touch of jealous denigration. The partnership came as a surprise to Krens.
"I had never been to Las Vegas until late 1999 and then it was almost under duress," he says. "I don't gamble."
But when Krens finally took the plunge, he found the town "fascinating" and fell in love with the mix of desert beauty and entertainment. However erecting a museum in Las Vegas didn't immediately come to mind.
"Las Vegas was not the most obvious place to associate with culture," he says. "But, Las Vegas is a town that is oriented toward the future.
"My sense is that the audience we normally serve is not fundamentally different than the one in Las Vegas."
Price of culture
What Guggenheim in Las Vegas actually symbolizes to many is the increasingly vitriolic battle between fine art and commercialism. Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight laments the "lure of the blockbuster" exhibit.
Such exhibits as "The Art of the Motorcycle," the Guggenheim Las Vegas' 130-piece homage to the open road, and a recent Andy Warhol show put on by Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art, are not art, Knight claims, but are simply ways to bring in money.
Critics are particularly offended that Krens may have brought his museum to Vegas hoping to rake in big bucks. According to an Associated Press story, Krens expected the Guggenheim to generate $15 million a year for his foundation and the Hermitage -- $7.5 million of which will go to the Guggenheim's Russian museum, more than doubling its current yearly endowments.
That didn't happen.
Across the nation, museums had a wet blanket year as attendance plummeted by 25 percent, making it one of the worst financial years in museum memory.
"To which I say: Who cares?" Knight writes. "Since when should we give a hoot whether a not-for-profit museum has made a profit?"
Bottom line
"This is not a business for sissies," Lorenz explains.
Only a handful of art museums around the country don't continually struggle for funding. While the goal of traditional art museums may not be to make a profit, they still need to cover the costs of doing business.
Revenue comes from a combination of endowments, government subsidies, corporate and philanthropic donations, admission fees, museum store revenues, general donations and major patrons.
But as the cultural arts suffer from a state-sponsored financial drought and corporate and philanthropic donors increasingly demand accountability for every dime, broadening a museum's audience base may be the only fiscal hope left.
"There are two aspects of running a museum," Lorenz says, "creating a great exhibit and getting people to see it."
Las Vegas attracts over 35 million people per year to the Strip.
"You can't deny that Krens is brilliant," Lorenz says. "He has strongly and blatantly taken the Guggenheim in a direction that museums typically haven't gone. (In Las Vegas) he set his museum smack dab in the middle of an audience. I think that's really very smart."
ArtNewspaper.com writer David D'Arcy quips that the reigning art world has always seen Krens as a Vegas showman, claiming, "Now his road show is booked into the one city where that is not an insult."
Like it or not, Las Vegas art museums find themselves suffering the same fate as Las Vegas itself: They just can't get no respect.
"I'd like to know what measure (critics) are using to determine success," says Barbara J. Bloemink, local curator and managing director of the Guggenheim Hermitage and Guggenheim Las Vegas museums. "By any measure I can think of, we have been very successful."
Its first exhibition, "Masterpieces and Master Collectors," drew critical acclaim and closed just inside in the black. It also attracted an estimated 250,000 visitors and reached out to the local schools and community with a grant from the Clark County Community Education Foundation and The Venetian that allowed more than 5,000 students and teachers to see the exhibit for free.
Bloemink ticks off three fingers and says, "Culturally, artistically and financially, I think we have been an astonishing success."
Knight was so enamored of the exhibit, in fact, one could almost hear him sigh in a review that writes of the Hermitage lending Pablo Picasso's "Three Women," "You can't quite believe it has happened."
The two museums are expected to bring in between 650,000 and 750,000 patrons before the end of the year, making it one of the most-visited museums in the country, Bloemink says, approaching the combined annual attendance of New York's Whitney and Museum of Modern Art.
Many of the Guggenheim's visitors, Bloemink adds, have never been to an art museum. If the job of a museum is to reach out to new audiences, she says, the Guggenheim is certainly doing that.
In addition, she adds, 98 percent of all viewers rave about what they have seen.
"Those are astonishing numbers of approval," Krens says.
Art of success
The Guggenheim isn't the only museum in Vegas that is faring well. The Steve Martin and Calder exhibits at Bellagio both made money. The Wynn Collection at the site of the former Desert Inn has a steady flow of customers. The Phillips Collection reportedly brought in $1 million while it was in Las Vegas. Even the local Las Vegas Art Museum has had its best year yet with "George Washington: A National Treasure."
That is in stark contrast to what the rest of the nation's art museums are experiencing, proving one thing: Display it, here, and they will come.
While critics continue their harangue about Vegas' bad taste and tacky shows, museum directors across the country who formerly wouldn't have dirtied a cheap print on a Vegas wall are ready to play Let's Make a Deal.
While some deals have fallen through, the Metropolitan Museum of Art recently opened a storefront in the Desert Passage at Aladdin.
Last December, PaceWildenstein, internationally renowned fine art dealers, took control of the Bellagio gallery's 2,600-square-foot space, entranced by the uniform success of the previous exhibits.
"We are aspiring to the kind of numbers that the Guggenheim gets," says Marc Glimcher, Chairman of the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art and curator of the newly opened "Faberge: Treasures From the Kremlin," who recalls that The Wynn Collection brought in almost 1 million visitors in its first two years, making it one of the top exhibition spaces in the country.
Advanced sales indicate that Faberge attendance should more than double the 800 to 1,000 daily attendance for the previous two Bellagio exhibits.
Glimcher says part of the success of the local galleries is due to their small scale. It gives visitors the opportunity to make mini-pilgrimages to organized, curated exhibitions.
"It is art that is incredibly powerful, that will capture people's imaginations. We want to make gallery productions as a filmmaker would make productions," Glimcher says.
Vegas, he says, is unique and is moving in a very different direction from the rest of the art world. It is the antithesis of, "the wave sweeping the nation where our major cultural institutions expand by creating extraordinary spaces and presences filled with blockbuster retrospectives," he says.
Spilling over
Lorenz sees something deeper going on. The texture of the local community is changing, she says, in part because of the presence of the galleries, but also because more art collectors are calling Vegas "home."
"The Las Vegas Art Museum is going to have the best year in our history, bottom line, from every aspect: attendance, public service, donations," says Lorenz, who estimates that during June and July almost 28,000 people came through the library-based gallery, as opposed to the 1,000 per month that the museum usually attracts.
Culture, she says, is about patrons, about artists and an educated public. For the first time, there is an excitement about more than the Strip and its attractions.
"We are in on the ground floor of a really happening thing," Lorenz says.
She even may have found "that magic person who wants to share their blessings and build a community." A major collector is considering loaning the museum its first Monet.
"That is how it begins," Lorenz says. "If we can just survive long enough, if we are patient, it is going to happen. But I am sorry, (this business) is never going to be easy."
The Vegas Guggenheims' first year was certainly not. Revenues were admittedly "a little disappointing," states Krens, but "we are absolutely paying our rent."
Nonetheless, he remains enamored by Vegas and its possibilities.
"Our interest is genuine," Krens says. "We are seriously interested in Las Vegas. I am fascinated by the context, the setting, of the idea of having a great cultural experience followed by a good meal and a motorcycle ride to Valley of Fire."
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