The irony could only be apparent to me. There on the front page of the vaunted Arts section of the New York Times on March 3 was a very odd review of The Showgirl Must Go On, in which reviewer Charles Isherwood did his level best to simultaneously fawn over Bette Midler and kick Las Vegas repeatedly in the nuts.
It began with a description of Vegas as “this sprawling gambling mecca, a steroidal temple of tackiness,” moved on to sneer at the 90-minute show length as “apparently the maximum time audiences here will agree to be entertained away from the slots and tables” and hammered home his assault by describing the uncouth millions who travel here as “masses who flock to this city in stupefying numbers in fervid search of ways to get rid of their money.”
What’s so ironic about that, you ask?
Well, I read his screed right as I was putting the finishing touches on a piece that I would go on to break on the very same pages of the very same newspaper five days later about MGM Mirage plunging $40 million into an ambitious collection of public art for CityCenter.
I could only wonder what Isherwood and his snooty pals thought when they opened their papers on their Manhattan terraces over brunch that morning to learn that none less than the great Vietnam Veterans Memorial sculptress Maya Lin was creating a $3 million, 133-foot-long cast-silver representation of the Colorado River.
Or that the rest of this ambitious collection includes commissioned or acquired works by the Elvises (Elvi?) of the art universe, folks like Jenny Holzer, Claes Oldenburg, Frank Stella, Henry Moore, Richard Long and Nancy Rubins.
Or, worse yet, that the CityCenter collection appears destined to kick off a Vegas art race that could make the city a serious contender for wealthy tourists whose aim in travel is primarily to visit the arts. Dave Hickey, the Vanity Fair art critic, already has been retained to advise executives on art purchases for the $2.8 billion, 4,000-room Fontainebleau resort due in late 2009 on the Strip, and MGM Mirage President Jim Murren says he’s been told the owners of the $4.8 billion, 5,000-room Echelon resort due in 2010 also have big plans.
What it adds up to is a potentially significant new chapter in Las Vegas’ cultural development. It began, of course, in 1998 when Steve Wynn opened his gallery in the Bellagio with pieces from Monet, Picasso and Renoir. The Guggenheim-Hermitage Museum then opened an outpost at the Venetian Hotel-Casino just off the main corridor, where reproductions of Italian frescos coat the enormous ceiling. Wynn, in his new resort, also opened a gallery, but then he realized he could make more money using the space to sell Rolexes. Oh well.
“We’re going to create an art program that will be important on a global scale, that will have some meaning to Nevada, that will have some meaning to the environmental sensitivities we’re trying to accomplish here and will have some meaning to the world of art at large,” Murren told me. “This will not be a collection of precious pieces from some bygone era but a collection that is approachable, of big scale. We need to make a big statement.”
The Isherwoods of the world most likely scoffed and went back to hunting for good fares to Paris. But we’ve been down this road before, haven’t we? They laughed when Vegas wanted its hotels to be viewed on par with the greats of the world, and now it is so. They choked on their foie gras when Vegas aspired to be a dining capital, and now no less than the Michelin Guide has anointed it as such.
In the process of my CityCenter piece, I interviewed an art critic, Joan Altabe of the Robb Report, who was harshly critical of Las Vegas in a 2002 piece I did for the Times on the Faberge exhibit at the Bellagio. She railed then against the idea of putting great art in a city where everything is so fake. How, she wondered, would people even know they were looking at the real thing with all the reproductions of famous cities and frescos around them?
Yet in a comment that got cut from this past weekend’s Times piece because of space constraints, she was bowled over by the CityCenter plan: “This is going to put Vegas on the map in a totally different way. Someone with an art mind is working here. I’m dazzled by this.”
And so we return for a moment to Isherwood’s commentary, in which he bafflingly asked: “Is it a little dismaying for longtime fans of Ms. Midler to find her installed in Las Vegas as the latest luxury product for high rollers in a city awash in them?”
I suspect that’s where his ilk will go with their disgust over this trend, toward the complaint that these great artists are selling out and being commercialized in Vegas.
Of course, that’s a ridiculous complaint. People spend far higher prices on hotel rooms, fancy meals, tourist attractions and show and concert tickets in New York than they do here. Perhaps to Isherwood, commerce in the arts is only inoffensive when it takes place in Manhattan.
Still, I wonder whether Isherwood is aware that Radio City Musical Hall this week is hosting the, uh, MySpace Music Tour. I mean, what a trashy town they have there!
Read Steve Friess’ daily blog at TheStripPodcast.blogspot.com and catch his weekly celeb-interview podcast at TheStripPodcast.com. He can be reached at [email protected].