LAS VEGAS — There may no longer be a major art museum in Las Vegas — the Las Vegas Art Museumshuttered in 2009— nor a joint outpost of the Guggenheim and Hermitage museums — which closed in 2008— but there is a museum-caliber art collection hidden in plain sight on the Vegas Strip. CityCenter, MGM Resorts’ sprawling five-complex campus, houses major works by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Henry Moore, Isa Genzken, Frank Stella, and more, as well as large-scale, site-specific commissions by the likes of Maya Lin, Nancy Rubins, Jenny Holzer, and a brand new James Turrell installation. The collection forms a component of MGM CEO and chairman James Murren’s vision for CityCenter as a more civic-minded hotel-casino-condo-mall megadevelopment.
“What makes a city successful? What makes people want to live there?” Murren asked during a press luncheon in June. “We do not have an art museum. I thought that was a big quality of life gap.” The CityCenter Fine Art Collection, then, is his attempt to fill that gap. As the closure of the Las Vegas Art Museum attests, the city still lacks a sufficiently broad set of collectors and donors capable of supporting a major art institute.
“There’s a very libertarian sensibility here, so public investment in art is a difficult proposition,” he said. “A lot of the philanthropy has been dedicated to necessity of life issues, and I think the art has suffered because of that.”
But contemporary art also suffers amid the sensory assault of your conventional casino floor — here best illustrated by Dennis Hopper’s floor-to-ceiling painting of Bill Cosby — the chaos of your resort registration desk — as in Lin’s unfortunately easy-to-miss “Silver River” (2009) — and the sterile luxury of your high-rise hotel’s 23rd-floor sky lobby — where Jack Goldstein’s “Untitled (Volcano)” (1983) loses much of its explosive visual force.
“Art was never part of the sensibility here, art was picked by designers to match the carpet,” Murren said, describing the conventional treatment of visual art on the Las Vegas Strip. At CityCenter, things are different: “The art has to be strategic, larger-format, provocative, in any number of ways.”
That’s certainly the case with the most successful works on view. Coosje and Oldenburg’s “Typewriter Eraser, Scale X” (1998-99) serves as a startling monument welcoming pedestrians to the complex, despite its awkward glass barrier — installed after a skateboarder rode part of the way up the sculpture, scratching it — a throwback to an earlier era at the gate to a futuristic complex.
Tony Cragg’s trio of stainless steel columns — “Bolt” (2007), “Bent of Mind” (2008), and “Untitled (Tall Column)” (2008) — which visitors going to and from the CityCenter parking lot pass through, are less anachronistic but also of a sufficiently large scale to compete with the architecture of the place. Their melty, droopy, at times anthropomorphic curves are at once futuristic and prehistoric, like spacey pancake stacks or stalagmites of liquid metal, both appropriate associations for a city of all-you-can-eat buffets surrounded by one of the continent’s most elemental landscapes.
The most remarkable may be Nancy Rubin’s accurately titled “Big Edge” (2009), a cantilevering assemblage of dozens of canoes, kayaks, and rowboats that juts 75 feet out over the main taxi, limo, and valet entrance to the complex. Like Lin’s subtler, 84-feet-long sculpture, Rubin’s work underlines its desert setting by evoking the distant rivers whose water Las Vegas relies on for drinking and electricity. Unlike Lin’s piece, Rubin’s is impossible to miss. Its craning form is a dramatic, strange, and seemingly precarious construction in a city of tightly controlled, thematically supercharged, and ultimately characterless environments. Faced with works like this, Murren’s vision begins to make sense.
Click the slideshow to see works from the CityCenter Fine Art Collection.
