Guggenheim rolls snake-eyes in Las Vegas

In the fall of 2001, the Guggenheim Museum and the State Hermitage Museum joined forces and opened the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas. This past weekend, the Las Vegas satellite museum closed its doors permanently and the strange three-way marriage ended. Read the press release here.

All in all, the failure of this venture doesn’t surprise me at all. Although there is no specific reason for the closure, it has to be assumed un-met attendance goals and low revenues were the primary reasons (fyi: the space is being filled by a Louis Vitton boutique and a theatre where "Phantom of the Opera" will play eight times a week – go figure). This begs the question: Who goes to Las Vegas for museum quality art?

As I see it, people go to Las Vegas for the following reasons (in no particular order): convention, gambling, show girls, quickie marriage, grade B entertainment, buffet dinning, free drinks, more gambling, and general debauchery. Very few people are prepared to go to Las Vegas and be wowed by Titians, Renoirs, Picassos and Van Goghs. It’s just not that kind of city. (Writer’s note: While attending a convention in Las Vegas, Laura did go to the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum. She even bought me a hat to prove it. I wear it all the time.)

This reminds me of the well documented experiment of placing the violinist Joshua Bell in a busy Washington DC subway station playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made. The result was a show of overwhelming ambivalence to the maestro by the hundreds of subway patrons who hurried past him. After great debate about the public’s empathy towards the arts, it was concluded that people were simply not prepared to listen to the beautiful music of Joshua Bell while in a subway. I suggest the same is true for Las Vegas and high level art museums. Appreciating fine art is not on the usual "to do" lists of Las Vegas visitors. Thomas Krens, the swashbuckling former director of the Guggenheim, should have seen this from the get-go and curbed his colonial enterprise.

Rarely will someone who is on their way to shake hands with a row of one-arm bandits drop into a museum and admire fine art. The closing of the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum in Las Vegas is disappointing, but it should come as no surprise. I got a groovy hat out of it though.

Comments

[Barbara]

Hello, Rob:

Disappointing, but hardly surpising, news about the closing of the art museum in Las Vegas. Clearly, fine art (of any genre) requires a different kind of ambience for enthusiasts than the glitz of Vegas.

Barbara