Fine Art's Wild Ride in Las Vegas 1998-2010
Steve Wynn, Dave Hickey, Libby Lumpkin, and the Guggenheim Hermitage
Looking at art in Las Vegas does have its eccentricities, however, since, unlike most places in the United States, Las Vegas has a vibrant, up-to-date, indigenous visual culture, so you look at whatever you look at in the context of the Strip, which, even though it is not art, sets the visible parameters of the environment. As a consequence, to be look-at-able here, art must first distinguish itself from the Strip and then mount some visual challenge to its hegemony. … Steven Wynn’s high-dollar paintings at the Bellagio, however, do kick some butt. They make Vegas more like it is, which is to say more visible, and Vegas makes the paintings more like they were——generous, sophisticated occasions of visual pleasure - Dave Hickey
Cities on the periphery have a tumultuous relationship with intellectual/cultural production. Instead of the steady output of world capitals like Paris and New York, or the distinct growth trajectory of up-and-comers like Los Angeles, other city scenes tend to wax and wane.
Fine art in Las Vegas had one fantastic and hopeful decade. For the first ten years of the 21st century, Las Vegas seemed to be on the verge of joining the global conversation, but instead the aughts were a high-water mark to which Las Vegas has never not yet returned1.
What made the years from 1998 to 2010 so unusual?
The prime mover was Steve Wynn, who had the money and the passion. At his right hand was the husband-and-wife team of Dave Hickey and Libby Lumpkin. Dave Hickey is of course the iconoclast, redneck, rock ‘n’ roll art critic who taught at UNLV on and off for 20 years. Libby Lumpkin is an art historian and curator who is probably most famous for her histories of the smiley face and the prohibited sign in her book Deep Design.
Throughout their time in Las Vegas, they worked to fulfill the potential of a world-famous city, one they hoped would eventually attract enough intellectuals to create a robust cosmopolitan culture. By their second decade here, their efforts seemed to be coming to fruition. Then … poof.
Dave Hickey understood Las Vegas. He took this strange city to heart. Art must find its footing inside of a visual culture that is part space-age technology and part the ancient urge to build the Tower of Babel. Higher. Bigger. Brighter than the Sun. Countless video walls hundreds of feet high line the strip like titanic dominoes, all designed to tempt and confuse. To evoke awe, lust, greed. To shoot straight through the eyeballs and into the lizard brain, overstimulating it into submission.
The strip visuals are not art, as Hickey notes, but they set the fucking tone. What will my eyes be dazzled by? What can appeal to my visual senses when one 7-11 here has more blinking lights than half the towns in the USA?
Hickey and Lumpkin knew what they were up against, which is why they were able to make some progress. For fine art to survive and find an audience here, the names needed to be familiar and the work supreme. Monet. Picasso. Rembrandt. Certainly nothing in common with regards to era, style, or nationality, but they make up the red meat of fine art, and the team of Hickey and Lumpkin knew that nothing works in Vegas like a steakhouse. Steve Wynn named Libby Lumpkin as the first curator for the original Bellagio Art Gallery, and the people poured in. The first Wynn collection, what Hickey called the high-dollar paintings, matched the vibe.
The early success of the Bellagio exhibits doubtless influenced the decision by the Guggenheim Foundation and the Hermitage to co-sponsor an art museum at the Venetian. Designed by Rem Koolhaas, the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum opened its doors in 2001 for a seven-year run. Besides the de rigueur Van Gogh and Picasso, they exhibited Rubens, Titian, Fragonard, Renoir, Monet, Degas, Rothko, Lichtenstein, Warhol. All the hits. And no one came. The locals hated it because the locals hate the strip. The tourists went to one art thing, and it was at the Bellagio. Still, for much of this unusual decade there was not just one but two fine art destinations on Las Vegas Boulevard.
And then there was the Las Vegas Art Museum. This wasn’t a new player—it was launched in the 1950s by first-family types who wanted to bring fine art to the city. Only a certain kind of fine artist need apply—earlier curators were dogmatic about rejecting anything too raw or weird. When Lumpkin became its director in 2006, she transformed the museum. They had a few notable exhibits, started to make a name on the contemporary art scene, and then closed abruptly in 2009. The crash didn’t help. The subheading of the Las Vegas Sun article announcing its demise declares “Museum officials hope to reopen when economy turns around.”
Steve Wynn never stopped collecting art, but as the decade progressed he seemed to become less interested in presenting it in galleries. After Wynn sold the Bellagio to MGM, some of the art collection was sold off. This was the era where he popped a Picasso with his elbow. When his namesake casino opened, it featured a gallery that included the misfortune-prone Le Rêve, but the gallery closed before the end of the first year.
As for Hickey and Lumpkin, they loved Vegas, but it didn’t love them back—at least not enough. They left for New Mexico in 2010. Their departure marks the closing date of this unusual era. After Hickey’s death, UNLV celebrated the heck out of him, but when he and Lumpkin left, he seemed pretty bitter about his experience with the university. In an interview with the Las Vegas Sun, he said, “I haven’t been able to make a dent in this pedagogical community.”
Even more disappointing, his goals for the city were unreached. In the same interview, he said, “I was wrong about things. I thought you could build on something here. I thought it was a little less-covert city. I didn't understand what being a Mormon meant . . . . They sort of exercise a lot of negative power here.”
Hickey and Lumpkin had discovered the deepest darkest secret of Sin City: it is run by some of the most religiously conservative families in the West.
One suspects that Lumpkin’s position at the oldest fine art institution in town put her in direct contact with some of the people Hickey obliquely references. The economic crash was a good excuse, but I wonder if they closed their purses when they saw the direction their pet art museum was taking.
He continued, “Improving the intellectual reach of graduates has been my task. I have done that, but they have nearly all left town. There's no intellectual critical mass here."
If someone so suited to the task as Dave Hickey and Libby Lumpkin couldn’t create that critical mass, who possibly could?
In the teens, art here would start to mean something else—locally it would disconnect from the actual art world and embrace a real-estate-powered vision of a renovated downtown, with mediocre murals and knockoffs of knockoffs of Basquiat. A touch of Burning Man here and there. When Hickey came back to visit in 2012, he made small waves by noting “I don’t give a shit about local artists. If you were any good, you wouldn’t be a local artist.”
In the casinos, notable works of art pop up randomly. Jeff Koons’ Tulips is still at the Wynn and the lobby bar at the Palms features one of Damien Hirst’s sharks2. Also, you can find art galleries operating at peak capitalist output. So much gold leaf. So many cartoon characters clutching cash in their furry or feathered fists. I don’t hate it. Money connotes power, and fine art has always been about power as much as beauty.
The Bellagio Fine Art Gallery still exists. The current exhibition is a collection of African American artists that includes the unforgettable geometry of abstract printmaker Mavis Pusey. It’s a fine way to spend a Sunday afternoon. But it’s not going to change for 18 more months. Why should they bother to change it when the tourists churn through weekly?
The woman in charge of admission was so sweet. She made sure to warn us before we paid that we wouldn’t see anything by Monet or Picasso. We reassured her that we already knew. We were about 15 years too late.
Elaine Wynn and LACMA are partnering to open a fine art museum here, but I’ll believe it when I see it.
Official title: The Unknown (Explored, Explained, Exploded). I had my birthday there one year. Dennis kept trying to talk to the bartender about Damien Hirst, who of course had no idea.