LAS VEGAS, Oct.8 -- New York's Guggenheim Museum, the McDonald's of the art world, opened a new outpost at the Venetian Resort Hotel Casino Sunday, bringing to this gambling capital its cultural resources along with those of two major European museums, the State Hermitage in St. Petersburg and the Kunsthistorisches in Vienna.
The Guggenheim Las Vegas -- an exhibition space rather than a museum with a permanent collection -- joins other Guggenheim franchises that include a satellite museum in New York's SoHo district, branches in Berlin and Venice, a Frank Gehry-designed museum in Bilbao, Spain, and collaborative initiatives with the Hermitage and the Kunsthistorisches.
In addition, a Guggenheim museum in Brazil is now being negotiated, and a secondary Guggenheim in New York, also designed by Gehry for the Wall Street area site, is in the planning stage.
The Las Vegas facility, designed by eminent Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, was created within casino entrepreneur Sheldon Adelson's existing Venetian Resort at a cost of $30 million to the hotel-casino.
It consists of two separate spaces, a smaller one -- the so-called "Jewel Box" -- for both the Guggenheim and the Hermitage to share and an airplane hangar-size hall to be used exclusively by the Guggenheim. The latter space, known as the "Big Box," comes with a huge end wall that can be transformed into a multi-media screen.
The opening exhibit at the Guggenheim Hermitage is "Masterpieces and Master Collectors," a show of 45 Impressionist and early modern works from both museum's collections, to run through next March. Works from the art history museum in Vienna may be included in later shows.
The Guggenheim hall measuring 210 by 60 feet with a 70-foot-high ceiling decorated with a facsimile of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling, is showing the BMW-sponsored design show, "Art of the Motorcycle."
This show already has proved vastly popular with the public when it was exhibited at the Guggenheim New York and the Guggenheim Bilbao, and has been installed in Las Vegas by architect Gehry. It will run through next summer and is expected to attract more than a million viewers, most of whom are expected to visit the Impressionist exhibition too.
These attendance predictions are not out of line considering that Las Vegas is the fastest growing city in the United States, attracting more than 35 million visitors annually, quite a few of whom do not gamble. After all, most Americans who gamble can do so at a casino within an hour's drive of their home city.
With overheads at casinos higher than ever before, their owners are beginning to see art along with conventions and retail as one more money-making lure to keep tourists, both gambling and non-gambling, entertained for perhaps a day or two longer.
A recent loan show from the Phillips Collection in Washington, at the Bellagio Resort, drew 180,000 visitors and took in more than $2 million in admissions, which was split between the museum and the Bellagio.
When casino developer Steve Wynn first opened the Bellagio in 1998, more than a million people reportedly paid to see his $300 million old master and modern paintings collection, since sold, in the resort's gallery in the first year. Now under the new ownership of MGM Grand, the Bellagio has exhibited the Phillips loan show and the modern art collection of movie star and comedian Steve Martin. Wynn will continue to exhibit art at his Desert Inn when it reopens in a few years.
Thomas Krens, the empire-building director of the Guggenheim, said he was skeptical at first about establishing a franchise in Las Vegas, where Art is more likely to be the name of your taxi driver, until he visited Wynn's gallery occupying two relatively small rooms at the Bellagio early this year.
"There it was, sandwiched between a wedding chapel and a yogurt stand, but people were standing in front of the paintings with real reverence, having a real cultural experience," Krens recalled. "It wasn't tacky at all. Las Vegas is changing. Today the profile of a typical Las Vegas visitor increasingly approximates the profile of the visitors upon which every major museum in the world depends."
But there are skeptics. A local art critic, Dave Hickey, caustically observed, "Las Vegas needs a Guggenheim about as much as it needs another prostitute." Hilton Kramer, dean of American art critics, wrote in he weekly New York Observer, that he expects Krens' "prostituting of the Guggenheim's fame" to result in an exhibition of Las Vegas slot machines at the Hermitage in the near future.
The Guggenheim will split proceeds from the galleries and a gift shop with the Venetian once the hotel-casino's initial costs are covered. And now that art in Las Vegas also spells big bucks, New York's Metropolitan Museum has announced that it will open a new museum store in the gambling capital that has such cultural icons as the Eiffel Tower, the Doge's Palace, and the Sphinx and the Pyramids as part of its skyline.
The Met's outlet, the first it has franchised outside New York in seven years, will be in the Desert Passage shopping mall of the Aladdin Hotel.
"Las Vegas has the greatest shopping you have ever seen," said Sally Pearson, head of the Met's merchandizing operation. "The No.1 pastime is shopping and it has overrun gambling as a source of revenue. It is just an absolute bonanza."
The new art museums are not Las Vegas' only museums.
There is one devoted to the history of casinos at the Tropicana and a neon museum celebrating the development of neon lighting so important to the city's nightlife image. There also are museums dedicated to the memory of Elvis Presley, complete with Elvis impersonators, and Liberace, two of the many entertainers identified with the city.
As Nancy Deaner of the city's Department of Cultural and Community Affairs explained: "The phenomenal growth of our population means that a lot of people here came from somewhere else, many from places that have an active cultural life. They're used to sophisticated cultural programming. What we have now reflects the uniqueness of Las Vegas.
"But the landscape should and will change. With these new art galleries, it's changing now."
