Art in Las Vegas rolls snake-eyes

"Fabulous Las Vegas" got a bit less fabulous in the last few weeks, at least for art.

• On Saturday, news broke that the Las Vegas Art Museum would shutter its doors at the end of the month, following steep budget cuts and the Dec. 2 resignation of Director Libby Lumpkin. LVAM had been raising its formerly sleepy profile in recent years.
• In early February, Anita and Poju Zabludowicz, chairman and chief executive of the private investment firm Tamares Group, canceled plans to build a $12-million contemporary art museum in an old fingerprinting building on East Fremont Street downtown. The couple, who began collecting art in the 1990s, might revive the idea when the economy recovers.
• In late January, the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, pimped out masterpieces from its collection to a Vegas Strip casino for an undisclosed rental fee. The rental from a nonprofit museum to a commercial enterprise violates various professional museum standards.

Slumping tourism has battered the gambling mecca, causing some of the aforementioned distress. But the town has never had a reputation for cultural philanthropy. Perhaps it's the Sin City mind-set, plainly in operation with the MCA San Diego deal, that if it doesn't make money it isn't worth doing.

Here's how the city's mayor, Oscar Goodman, responded to the Las Vegas Sun when asked about the Zabludowiczes' change of plans:

"I don't see a museum for art as necessary downtown," Goodman said. "The masters are on the Strip. There's also a round-trip plane fare to Los Angeles. It's not necessary to have an art museum. I want a mob museum."

That would be mob as in gangsters, not crowds.

-- Christopher Knight

Photo: Gabriel Bouys / AFP / Getty Images

Comments

[Jennifer Harrington]

Things here are going to have to come back down to grass roots style. A young art community is not something that can be falsely bought. If the two million people that live here care about art, they must get off the couch, turn off the TIVO and simply participate in the art happenings that are all around them.
Art may not live with integrity in Hotel-Casinos, it might live in small galleries and at our university. If we look, and listen, we have a great responsibility to future generations of people living here, to cultivate the Arts in Las Vegas. Many people have put in years of actual hard work to do this, and for this I commend them. To the people who complain about not enough culture in Las Vegas, I would be happy to give you a weekly schedule of events and goings on that are worthy of your time, give me a call....