Las Vegas launches two peculiar and astonishing museums
Russian minister of culture, Mikhail Efimovich Shwydkoi, watch two movie screens suspended at chandelier level above the podium where he stood - along with a thousand or so diners - in the Venetian Casino Hotel, Las Vegas, on Friday night.
In a spur-of-the-moment the American diners gave him a standing applause. The launch of the two oddest museums of the new millennium, the Guggenheim and Hermitage-Guggenheim Galleries in the Venetian Resort Hotel Casino, was a highly political occasion. Besides the Minister of Culture and his deputy, Russia had sent the Minister of Press and Information and the Moscow parliament's deputy speaker to celebrate the debut of their country's leading museum, the State Hermitage, in Las Vegas.
Since the Guggenheim and the Hermitage announced their intention to create galleries in newest Vegas gambling hotels, the art world has been tut-tutting over the denigration of art implied by such a method.
Vegas was the only state where gambling was legal when she was created, with no state taxes on income made her prosper. However, the legalization of gambling across most of America in the course of the Eighties presented Vegas with a challenge to which it has risen with crazy imagination.
In the past 10 years, the city transformed by the creation of vast luxury casino hotels echoing, in Hollywood style, the most revered landmarks of the old world. The city became one of the prime tourist attractions of America. Luxurious, clean and reputedly Mob-free, it is now considered a purveyor of family fun as well as an appealing gathering center.
About 37 million visitors came to Vegas in 2000. The hotel owners are offering various finest restaurants in the country, branches of luxury goods shops (including the Metropolitan Museum of Art) - and now high art. The insight came from Steve Wynn the casino entrepreneur and art collector, who began the re-invention of Las Vegas when he opened the Mirage Hotel in 1989. The Bellagio Hotel did the same, with a Picasso restaurant full of real Picassos and a small art gallery next to the hotel's wedding chapels containing his collection of Impressionist and modern paintings. It was regularly filled with visitors. Wynn sold them two years ago and took his pictures with him.
The Venetian Hotel opened in 1999 and was determined to beat the Bellagio at its own game by inviting in the Guggenheim. That was the year the Hermitage and the Guggenheim signed a broad-ranging collaboration agreement and Krens brought the Hermitage in on the act. While both museums hope to earn fortunes from their new galleries, they also regard the union of high and low cultures as a worthwhile cultural Krens has made no compromises on quality. The Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas The large Guggenheim Gallery, which will host temporary exhibitions from the Guggenheim, kicks off with the museum's motorcycle show, which has already set visitor records in New York and Bilbao. The display, designed by Canadian architect Frank Gehry, places the motorbikes in an abstract landscape of stainless steel mountains and rivers.
The small Hermitage-Guggenheim Gallery, referred to by Krens as the "jewel box", is made of steel rusted to shades of reddish brown, reminiscent of the strongly coloured velvet walls of the Hermitage, says Koolhaas. Three movable partitions divide the gallery into four spaces - one dominated by a astonishing early Monet and three great Cezannes from the Hermitage; a space dominated by two Chagalls and a Delaunay from the Guggenheim; one dominated by early Picassos and Matisses from the Hermitage; and finally a flood of Kandinskys from the Guggenheim. The shows are supposed to change every six months. This one will be hard to beat.
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