The Brahmins are booing again. The Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art recently announced it would follow Monet: Masterworks from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston with another loan show from that venerable bastion of East Coast culture. The BGFA will traverse the reliably popular topography of 19th-century French painting with The Impressionist Landscape from Corot to Van Gogh, opening June 10.
Geoff Edgers reported in the Boston Globe that the questions raised by the first loan show, for which the MFA supposedly received $1 million, continue to harass its successor; namely that the museum is using its collection as a cash cow. I argued here, and repeat, that money and art are hopelessly intertwined, and that whining about the show had a whiff of Vegas-hating snobbery about it.
And so it might again. And again, we're the lucky beneficiaries, as we get to view paintings by masters such as Renoir, Cezanne, Van Gogh. But it would be encouraging if the BGFA, run by New York's Pace Wildenstein Gallery, would organize shows more frequently (Monet closes May 30 after 15 months), maybe even ship westward shows seen in its New York spaces by artists like Chuck Close or Claes Oldenburg.
The Bellagio gallery was started, of course, by Steve Wynn, and his curator was Libby Lumpkin, who decamped two years ago to a post at California State University, Long Beach. But Lumpkin has returned to write a new page of the Las Vegas Art Museum saga.
Lumpkin said by phone last week, she has moved back to start a design program at the International Institute of Modern Letters. But in addition she is taking the position of "consulting executive director" at LVAM. Karen Barrett will remain as executive director, in charge of finances.
Lumpkin's involvement can only bode well for LVAM, which has played musical regime chairs the last few years. You have to wonder, though, how she will get along with curator-at-large James Mann, who has organized some good shows but who has nonetheless aligned LVAM with an idiosyncratic, anti-postmodernist philosophy. Lumpkin would only say she looked forward to working with Mann and LVAM. In any event, Lumpkin says she and husband Dave Hickey, the MacArthur Award-winning critic and curator, are back in Las Vegas to stay.
Snap! Vegas, the Contemporary Arts Collective's contribution to Las Vegas' centennial celebration, is one of those shows that make you wish CAC had the space and resources to really do it right. Still, Snap! Vegas is a winning assortment of offbeat photographs of our much-pictured city.
Ben Schkade, for instance, takes the familiar tack of photographing neon signs at steep angles. But his large-scale prints are deeply detailed, setting up tension between an abstract formalism and the resolute reality of glowing tubes attached to metal. Darius Kuzmickas' pinhole-camera prints lend Vegas scenes an air of 19th-century pictorialism, especially in his view of the Venetian facade, which does more for the illusion of Venice than the building. And John Rohling's "Wet Floor Vegas" prints, in which familiar local sites are pictured as puddle reflections, make their subjects seem particularly dreamlike.
Finally, a couple of shows I wish I had gotten to earlier: Jerry Schefcik, director of UNLV's Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery, organized two discrete exhibitions for the city, and you have through this weekend to see them. Bright Light City at Charleston Heights Art Center is an assortment of sometimes twisted views of the city by such artists as Charles Morgan, Robert Beckman and Diane Bush. Bob Wysocki, Curtis Fairman and Angela Kallus are among the local artists indulging a flair for visual Indulgence at Reed Whipple Cultural Center.