So. The Wynn has opened and the comedown has begun. In terms of surprises, this ranks somewhere just south of the post-rain arrival of rainbows. If you stand on top of a very tall building, you've got to come down at some point. Along with this post-celebration deflation has come its sinister twin, The Backlash. The lash, in this case, falls not only upon Steve Wynn, but upon those of us who are customarily dazzled by him. In the past week, for instance, we have seen the revival of the very valid point that the local press underreported Wynn's financial troubles in the days before MGM's 2000 takeover of Mirage Resorts. And some very level journalistic heads have told us that the pre-opening coverage of Wynn Las Vegas was a sure sign that our objectivity hasn't become any more impressive in the past half decade. Not a bad point, considering the top headline in the April 19 Las Vegas Sun was "Wynn offers inside look at new resort" and the second headline was "New pope chosen."
I am quite prepared to admit that we, the media, fall into a habit of cheerleading, and equally prepared to concede that this is not a particularly good habit. But what interests me is
why we are so prepared to grab the megaphone and declaim our everlasting appreciation of a fellow like Steve Wynn. The standard curmudgeonly explanation is that this town—like all towns, but maybe more so—is home to a rather off-putting, incestuous relationship between media and big business. (We should note that our own parent company produced Wynn-related publications.) That may be true, but it doesn't explain why journalists I know who have nothing whatsoever to gain from the the resort's success are hoping for it anyway, and why they are inclined to look for beauty and innovation where they ought—so say the level heads—to be excavating the financial and moral quicksand upon which great business ventures are so often built.
One of the more enjoyable journalistic sports is lashing back at the backlash, and if it weren't for the Wynn backlash, it probably would not have occurred to me to lash back here. But it strikes me that when a grand private space opens to the public, the big story really is the one about how that private space looks to public eyes. It will impact us precisely to the degree that it serves us—serves our imaginations, our sense of place, our desire for one more spot to congregate and celebrate our city. The business story is, of course, not to be ignored—if Wynn Resorts winds up being a house of cards, it falls on all of us—but to argue that the "hard" news be privileged over the "soft" is a misunderstanding of what news is.
A few years back, before the release of James Cameron's Titanic, all anyone could talk about was what a terrible money pit the film was. For just about everyone but film financiers, though, the more important story was whether the movie was any good. The comparison might be fatuous (because Wynn happens to employ several thousand people whose ships will sail or sink with his) but not entirely so: Steve Wynn long since ceased to be merely a player in the casino industry. At some point, he became an artist, or at least an impresario, and we began to evaluate his projects not as engines of the economy but as very, very public works of art. We have always tended to forgive our artists their foibles, their infidelities and financial indiscretions. Dostoyevsky was a compulsive gambler, a more-than-occasional anti-Semite, and a somewhat difficult spouse, but we judge him by his works. If he'd written a crummy novel (or if his ethnic chauvinism had taken over his novels as it did his essays), we'd hold him responsible for it. Otherwise we just step into his stories and look around us and say, Not bad, not bad at all.
For better or worse, deservedly or not, we've adopted Steve Wynn as the closest thing we've got to a civic giant—not just an industry titan, but a paradigm-shifter, a city-creator. The evidence of his contribution is irrefutable: It takes up a pretty good chunk of the most important street in town. If his latest creation really is nothing more than an insular resort that turns its back on the city that loves him—and it'll take more than a first impression to make that characterization stick—he'll have earned our vocal dismay. In the meantime, we'll keep reminding ourselves not to be derelict in our duty to remain skeptical and cynical and curious about every last detail. We'll remind ourselves again and again as we look to our skyline in wonder.