Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

DAILY MEMO: CULTURE:

Give the arts community time to grow

For its relative youth, city is making progress

Sun Archives

The term “arts in Las Vegas” is fodder for many jokes that involve the word “oxymoron.” But maybe the dichotomy isn’t so much between “art” and “Las Vegas” as it is between those telling the jokes and those wincing at them.

Let’s begin with this: Las Vegas doesn’t begin to measure up to New York or Chicago or other older, wealthier cities in a contest of high culture.

It does make efforts to narrow the culture gap.

Here is what we know:

• Consultants came to Henderson this year to study the possibility of building a museum. The city is moving forward with a plan.

• The Smith Center for the Performing Arts is to break ground in January.

• The Las Vegas Art Museum brings in innovative contemporary exhibits even as it waits to build downtown.

• Metro Arts formed this year to streamline arts funding and marketing.

• The Nevada School of the Performing Arts has moved into the Fifth Street School and began classes last week.

• Las Vegas has these established gems: the Marjorie Barrick Natural History Museum, the long-running Charles Vanda Masters Series, the Lied Discovery Museum, the Black Mountain Institute, the Vegas Valley Book Festival and the libraries/cultural centers created by visionary Charles Hunsberger, who was library director in the 1980s. It also has the Las Vegas Philharmonic.

All of this is fairly new, of course. When New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded in 1870, Las Vegas wasn’t a city. The New York Philharmonic was founded even earlier, in 1842. The Art Institute of Chicago has roots going back to 1879.

When esteemed museums in those cities were fattening their collections in the past century, Las Vegas was scratching out a reason to exist, eventually entertaining America with the Rat Pack, neon and dinner deals.

The people of New York and Chicago and Boston knew something two centuries ago. It takes a community to have an arts community. They supported fledgling arts.

Many Las Vegans are doing the same today, with mixed results. “Las Vegas Diaspora: The Emergence of Contemporary Art from the Neon Homeland,” a Dave Hickey-curated show at the Las Vegas Art Museum, drew international interest but only 4,000 visitors during the three-month exhibit. And that was one of the more popular shows.

Everybody, it seems, wants the Neon Museum to open. Not everybody is willing to help fund last-minute operations to rescue the signs, which overcomes the process of meeting the museum’s long-term goals.

Gallery owners in the Arts District want residents to come downtown, but don’t keep their galleries open daily because there isn’t enough foot traffic.

Downtown boutiques and home stores that closed their doors were of no lesser quality than those in other cities. Las Vegas Paper Doll was a testament to that. Lynn Peri Collection had a wide range of sophisticated, unique and arty collectibles, wall hangings and furniture, but not enough customers.

Las Vegas is a young city with a crowded, underfunded education system, a mostly commuter university, a large hospitality industry and a growing number of young professionals — many transplanted from older cities.

William Fox, writer, scholar, former executive director of the Nevada Arts Council and author of “In the Desert of Desire: Las Vegas and the Culture of Spectacle” (University of Nevada Press, 2005) says Las Vegas newcomers still have a cultural allegiance to where they came from. Some give to the arts in other cities, their former cities, but not their new one.

“As generations turn, we’ll have more patrons here,” Fox says. “It takes a long time for patronage to grow up.”

Just how long is up to us.

Editor's note: This story has been changed to correct an error. The story originally stated that the Nevada School of the Performing Arts is scheduled to move into the Fifth Street School, but it already has moved into the Fifth Street School and began classes last week.

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