They came, they saw, they were impressed and perplexed

Friday, June 8, 2007 | 7:18 a.m.

A strange thing happened at the Sahara West Library. Visitors climbed off a tour bus and not only noticed the abstract sculpture out front, they approached it.

Of course they did. This was a different sort of tourist, one who crawled through the valley on tours in conjunction with the Americans for the Arts Conference.

They stopped at the Liberace and Guggenheim Hermitage museums, rode past auto court signs, viewed public art, learned about downtown redevelopment and searched out the city's architectural symbolism.

It was a rare opportunity for Las Vegas to explain itself in a forum on arts, to say that we're not just about pasties and reckless water use.

It seemed to be working. A group that toured, yes toured, the Sahara West Library actually took interest in the facility, fired questions, scribbled notes, marveled at the creative use of natural light and nodded approvingly when learning the district has libraries designed by architects Antoine Predock and Michael Graves.

They likened former library director Charles Hunsberger's vision of libraries as cultural spaces to Carnegie Libraries.

Then onto the adjacent Las Vegas Art Museum, where executive director Libby Lumpkin greeted them with a reminder to not touch the works by Kaz Oshiro. "You'll want to touch them," she said.

Barbara Derix wanted to sniff them. She wanted to know whether they are indeed paintings on stretched canvas. The three-dimensional trompe l'oeil works disguise themselves as scuffed fast-food trash bin, dusty amplifier or household appliance. The hyper-realistic paintings - "postmodern photography" - baffle and tantalize.

The group was impressed. Many had not heard of Oshiro, a Japanese-born artist, whose career is on the rise.

"I see a lot of Zen in the humility, the disappearing into the work and the adulation for the ordinary object," Lumpkin said to the huddled mass.

But this crowd was perplexed about why minor obscenities in Oshiro 's and artist Sush Machida Gaikotsu's work s are controversial in a town that splashes fleshy buttocks and ample bosoms on billboards and taxicabs.

"If you go down to the Strip you see 16 different kinds of pornograpy," said Lynne Baer, an independent public art consultant from San Francisco.

"It's silly but it's true," Lumpkin said. "I drive down Desert Inn and all of the sudden I'm driving down this woman's cleavage."

It seemed hypocritical.

"Most contemporary art deals with the big issues of life," Lumpkin said. "We want to focus on contemporary works, and work of the 1980s and ' 90s is all about identity and sexuality."

The museum's conservative approach to adult themes will change when it opens a much larger centrally located branch near the airport, Lumpkin said. It can section off certain works from school children and allow the contemporary museum to breathe, to be itself.

"Do you have a permanent collection?" someone asked.

A heritage collection serving as a repository for contemporary artwork in Las Vegas is in the plans. The museum has accepted more than $500,000 in new works during the past two years without soliciting any. Its recent change from a community art center to a cutting edge contemporary facility is a high note for the young city.

But eventually an inquiry about an Alexis Smith mural at the museum returned the conversation to censorship.

Her mural, "Scarlet Letter," hangs outside the library. Featuring a giant, red "A" placed over an inverted version of Thomas Lawrence's 18th - century painting "Pinkie," the Las Vegas Centennial mural had committee members brawling over how the reference to adultery put a black mark on Las Vegas.

Tour members were dumbfounded.

Lumpkin explained that locals tired of seeing sex everywhere ask "where can I get away from it" and look to the museum for high culture.

Baer considered this. "In some ways I'm horrified by the degradation of women. But to me, that's what's here, that's the state of things. But if you live here and are a part of that , to come and be outraged by art there seems to be a contradiction."

That said, Baer added: "Her last statement changed my way of thinking."