With new deal, Godt-Cleary gallery ready for ‘a fun ride’

Thursday, March 23, 2006 | 7:24 a.m.

Las Vegas' contemporary arts scene became more sophisticated with the addition of two blue-chip art dealers.

Los Angeles dealers Bill Griffin and James Corcoran recently completed their purchase of Godt-Cleary Projects, a contemporary gallery at 1217 S. Main St., partnering with gallery director Michele Quinn.

The highly respected dealers handle the big names in contemporary art, and the partnership, some say, shows that Las Vegas is on the cusp of a cultural shift.

"We're at the tipping point," said Libby Lumpkin, consulting executive director at the Las Vegas Art Museum. "We're a visual culture. Ninety-nine percent of how these hotels sell themselves is all visual.

"It's a great place for art, a great place for thinking and a great place to reconsider all your visual perceptions."

Griffin, owner of a self-named gallery in Santa Monica, Calif., handles the work of several high-profile artists, including James Turrell, Richard Serra, Richard Long and Robert Rauschenberg.

Corcoran has been an art dealer for more than 30 years and had owned a gallery.

The partnership in Las Vegas, Griffin said, "will be a strategic expansion from what we're doing here in Los Angeles."

"Las Vegas is becoming a cultural powerhouse," he said. "With casinos moving into the high-culture arena, that makes sense for G-C to be there.

"I think it's the future."

In the context of design and contemporary art, he said, "It may even eclipse L.A."

The sale of the gallery went through in January, but Quinn and her new partners just finished signing papers.

The gallery, previously owned by casino executive and art collector Glenn Schaeffer, will be known as G-C Arts. Quinn said the gallery plans to stay on Main Street and said operations will continue as they have been.

The gallery will still house Schaeffer's collection, and there will be four exhibits a year. The gallery will operate as an art management company, focusing on corporate collections, including hotels.

"This opens a huge opportunity for us in terms of inventory," said Quinn, who will continue to oversee exhibits at the gallery. "It gives us better resources. Better inventory is making us stronger as a gallery."

Regarding Griffin and Corcoran, she said, the gallery had partnered with them "on several endeavors."

"We were doing so much with them already," Quinn said. "It seemed like the most logical step."

Quinn has been with the gallery since its inception. She was brought in from New York to curate the art at The Hotel at Mandalay Bay. Schaeffer had been an executive at the hotel.

She had previously been a department head at Christies in New York and director of the New York print galleries, Brooke Alexander and Gemeni GEL.

Quinn has worked on several corporate collections, including work with Mellon Bank, Goldman Sachs, New York Hospital and Nevada Cancer Institute. Godt-Cleary Projects, she said, is finishing Harrah's executive collection.

The bulk of the Godt-Cleary's clientele has been local and mostly corporate, and G-C Arts will continue with that clientele.

Godt-Cleary has shown works by such artists as Ed Ruscha and Rauschenberg. In July it brought in a Turrell light projection and John McCracken sculpture.

It just ended a Serra show and is opening a Tim Bavington exhibit on Friday. Before that, there was an exhibit of Ken Price, John Wesley and Raymond Pettibon works.

Griffin said Las Vegas is "a great laboratory," adding that in a cultural context, casinos are seeing contemporary art as something more "additive."

Before, Griffin said, "it was more pirate ships and volcanoes."

"The whole city is reinventing itself every week," he said.

"With clients and trade, there's so much moving through Las Vegas," he said. "Las Vegas has such transitional power.

"It's going to be a fun ride."