What if, instead, we reinvented our ideas about art? What if we dismissed the notion that it should be attached to objects—paintings, sculptures? What if we were to propose that the true art of Vegas is really a constantly evolving series of living paintings, with the city as a collage of elements superimposed in a somewhat bewildering manner, layers of meaning overlapping?
Around 1850, industrialization enforced such social and economic changes that traditional art became inadequate for modern life. Nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire introduced the idea of a flâneur—a "botanist of the sidewalk," as he called it—a hometown tourist, a free agent who leisurely strolls a metropolis, analyzing a wonderland of his or her own construction. He's not there to make purchases or work or contribute to the commercial aspect in any way.
The flâneur was conceptually crucial to cultural critic Walter Benjamin, who had an apparent obsession with the phenomenon of 19th-century Parisian outdoor malls, called arcades. With exquisite shops, wide walkways, gardens and marble columns bracing ceilings of glass, the arcade begat the flâneur, then romanced him to give birth to modern department stores. Unfinished and published more than 40 years after his death in 1940, Benjamin's enormous volume of fragmented musings on the topic, The Arcades Project, posits that the arcades were a series of half-hallucinatory images, a hollow mold from which the modern was cast. Ennobling "technological necessities through artistic ends," he writes, "the creation of fantasy prepares to become practical as commercial art."
Hold on; we'll get back to Las Vegas in a moment.
Arcades sprawled entire city blocks, providing not much reason to venture on to real streets—not a far cry from what we know as the Strip. Fusing notions of indoors and outdoors, the arcade is a physical, commercial representation of the flâneur, simultaneously inhabiting inside and outside worlds, purposeful in its devotion to leisure.
In 1957, a very small group of international political and artistic activists who called themselves Situationists picked up on this modern concept of an interior-exterior world. Situationist theory argued that industry made room for all sorts of leisure time that should be filled with a kind of creativity that made the world an extension of man.
The first journal of Internationale Situationniste explained that "a situation is ... an integrated ensemble of behavior in time." Situationists argued that the world we see isn't the real world, but a show, a representation of the world that capitalism has dusted off, appropriating our notions of culture, emotions and ideals and selling them back to us. Take, for instance, powerhouse Australian photographer Peter Lik, who has three Las Vegas galleries in a span of three miles. He romanticizes a landscape similar to—and sometimes the same as—the one we see out our windows. And we're buying it at inflated prices, blown up glossy in hyperpsychedelic contrast. It's taking something we know and love for its own sake, repackaging it as an art object, and selling it back to us in the name of nostalgia.
So if you can't trust objects—including art—then what becomes truly real is a mode of thought, perspective and perception.
After a group of Parisian university students aligned with Situationist philosophy provoked an upheaval in 1968 in which nearly 600 students were arrested, the school was covered in graffiti slogans. "CULTURE IS THE INVERSION OF LIFE," someone wrote, pointing out that true artistic sophistication is life itself.
"The way we see is affected by what we know or believe," writes art critic and painter John Berger in Ways of Seeing. We're constantly constructing narratives out of juxtapositions of images, filling in cognitive space with our own personal perceptions.
Art is a state of mind, some artists say, and plenty of artists have conceived of art as something disconnected from object, notably connecting it to performance, but we can all view it as something outside of concept or deliberation. "The enlarged conception of Art includes every human action," German performance artist Joseph Beuys declared. "Every human being is an artist." That life itself must be a work, says Michael Kimmelman in The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa, "has been one of modern art's most radical propositions. Art is out there waiting to be captured, the only question being whether we are prepared to recognize it." The world abounds with accidents waiting to be viewed as art. And those accidents seem to be especially concentrated in Vegas.
Which makes this the ideal city for you to become a modern flâneur—analyzing the cityscape as a series of artworks unfolding in real time.
With this frame of mind, the living image of an elderly woman covered in a thin layer of hardened brown hide, wearing a slinky gold top that was more space than fabric, fake breasts hanging out, mashing faces with a man equal her elder who was dressed like a cross between a Disney magician and Sinbad becomes less chilling than beautiful for its hideous awesomeness. We're vulgar, sexual, funny animals, sometimes so possessed by lust that our surroundings cease to exist. It's a spark of freedom in which we forget or don't care that others judge us, and déclassé and reprehensible as this image may be, might it not inspire others to shed inhibition and pursue desire?
Commercial Center off Sahara, home to world-renowned Thai restaurant Lotus of Siam, is also home to churches, a wig store and a swingers' club. That it's across the street from the local Scientologist headquarters is no longer one of those things we take for granted as part of Vegas kitsch, and is instead delightfully significant for its diversity. The barrage of discordant images doesn't lend itself to any concrete identity. This city is set up to evacuate a sense of self, not so much to cater to a sense of indulgence, as tourists like to think, but to simply confuse. To live here, you have to surrender.
Excalibur's the main view from the parking lot of Denny and Lee's Magic Studio, a prop house and theater where you can purchase rare, expensive books on mentalism and syzygy and "pre-thoughts," a "squash a dove drawer box" for $90, a space capsule for $900. Behind a magic castle that's planted on a magic Strip is a store where you get to learn about live-show magic. It's an unintentionally exposed back door, and it's really funny. A lot of young and fast art these days is a quick riff like this, a tiny little joke you appreciate for a moment, and then move on. The crucial thing though is that you do appreciate it, even for a second. People here should take the time to laugh at these things.
Consider the sculpture garden of temporary makeshift car lots erected on swaths of gravel on the roadside, the same swaths of gravel with a hand-scrawled sign offering to pick up dog poop for ten bucks a week and a bland Olan Mills-style family-portrait-as-billboard advertising $99 wills. And then consider Vegas' fake natural beauty: When it snows over the Strip, the clouds are hysterical puffs of steam from a laundry room's exhaust and the reflection of all the neon blasting up into them makes the whole sky look like the milk of a cracked-open opal. Where else in the world can you see a false aurora borealis?
The artifice is sometimes depressing, sometimes amusing—sometimes both—but these are the kinds of highlights that are actually glimmers of hope because they offer the most insight.
Las Vegas is an exhaust valve for the rest of America, and that's something locals take for granted. People come from all over the planet to blow their waste. Modernism has taught us that difficulty is interesting and worthy of our time. We're wary of facile, overly beautiful art, Kimmelman says. "I have come to feel that everything, even the most ordinary affair, is enriched by the lessons that can be gleaned from art," he writes.
"That beauty is often where you don't expect to find it; that it is something we may discover and also invent, then reinvent, for ourselves; that the most important things in the world are never as simple as they seem but that the world is also richer when it declines to abide by comforting formulas."
Art is our entrée into the esoteric and transcendent. "It illustrates that beauty is not something static and predictable and always there at the top of a mountain," says Kimmelman, "but an organic, shifting, elusive and therefore more desirable goal of our devotion, which we must make an effort to grasp."