Commentary: Can Las Vegans learn the art of appreciation?

By Kristen Peterson

Tuesday, Aug. 14, 2007 | 7:07 a.m.

You learn that Max Beckmann's "Paris Society" is coming back to town and you can hardly contain yourself.

The painting is part of a showcase exhibit at the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum that also includes an early Picasso, a couple of Manets, Pierre Bonnard, Juan Gris and other treats.

Grateful that someone shipped them to your back yard, you head to the Venetian.

But getting to the museum is confusing. The parking structure's elevator doesn't open to a stylish entry. Visitors trek through a roped-off portion of the parking ramp, cross a concrete skyway reminiscent of a construction zone and spill into a small foyer.

You go down the escalators, into the casino, veer to your left, past the food court and the screaming slot machines, turn into a hallway of high-end shops and slip across to the dark cove on the other side.

This is the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum's ticket counter and entry.

You've made it. You buy your tickets - $12 for locals - for "Modern Masters From the Guggenheim Collection," stroll into the first partitioned space of the gallery to contemplate Fernand Leger's gradations and "tubism" in "Woman Holding a Vase."

But the museum doors don't block the sound of outside revelers and contemplation is difficult. Still overloaded from the dizzying casino, you try to ignore the noise, then begin to wonder, "Is this worth it?"

An art museum should be a sanctuary, a quiet, church like space that allows for personal reflection and intellectual pondering.

There are locals who refuse to attend the exhibits at the Guggenheim because of the hassle of the Strip. Building local membership hasn't been easy, despite relentless efforts by museum staff. Though part of the initial design for the hotel, the museum feels like an afterthought. Occasionally someone will grumble about the quality of the exhibits. Some readers call asking why they should pay high admission fees at either the Guggenheim or Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art when they could pay the same at a museum in the city they moved from. There, they could see a vast permanent collection, eat at the cafe, linger in the bookstore and make a day of it.

There is a simple answer: You are no longer in your old city.

This is Las Vegas, a 21st century city.

When the Art Institute of Chicago was founded in 1879, Las Vegas was a small farming community and a stop on a trade route. The Chicago museum spent the next 125 years amassing a collection of 30,000 works, ancient to contemporary. The Museum of Fine Arts Boston is three years older. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art opened in 1935

While old money was infusing high culture in the early 20th century, Las Vegas was still a dusty railroad town.

Eventually, we became a haven for glitzy entertainment rather than high art.

Given that, your eyes still widen when you learn that Franz Marc's "The Unfortunate Land of Tyrol" is going to be in town, along with Chagall's "The Soldier Drinks."

On many levels, it's a treat.

In "Modern Masters" we get a glimpse of the early modern artists who abandoned tradition to explore intellectual principles of color, form, movement and emotion. They learned from and inspired one another. A spin around each gallery space gives an elementary art history lesson of their time.

Several pieces have been featured in exhibits at the museum. But a viewer can never experience a painting once and call it a day. We long for institutions with marble halls where we can return to a painting over the years as if it were an old friend.

We can be picky and complain about the hassle of the Strip and blame the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation for not giving us more, but as a community we have failed to provide it for ourselves.

The city's best art collection in a public space lives at the Nevada Cancer Institute, where about 200 pieces of contemporary art, including works by Ellsworth Kelly, Uta Barth, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol are on display.

How can that be when Phoenix has an art museum with 17,000 works in its collection? It includes about 1,200 European paintings, drawings and sculptures dating to the 14th century. It has a modern collection and contemporary works by the likes of Keith Haring and Cindy Sherman.

Phoenix's museum was founded nine years after the Las Vegas Art Museum, which formed as an art league and served well as a community art space. But it never accumulated a serious collection or was professional enough to receive quality artwork on loan from major institutions.

With a new staff and administration, the local museum and its big-name board members - Roger Thomas, Glenn Schaeffer, Jim Murren, to name a few - are moving forward, even planning to open a more centrally located space. It borrows prestigious contemporary works from private collectors and accredited museums and has been receiving gifts from community members even though it hasn't launched a formal acquisitions program. But carloads of locals aren't making the trip to the museum's not-so-remote location in Summerlin despite the high - caliber exhibits, including Southern California Minimalism in January 2006.

The Las Vegas Art Museum will continue to have these brilliant contemporary shows and will house a collection built by the community.

But what about the masters?

If it weren't for these money-making art galleries on the Strip, we'd never see them here.

Who else is going to crate a Mondrian, Picasso, Monet, Klee or Warhol and ship it to Las Vegas, have it installed and invite the public to view it for the price of a movie and popcorn?

If not the Guggenheim or PaceWildenstein (which owns the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art), then who ?

"Modern Masters" is worth it. But for a more regal experience, we suggest the valet.