LAS VEGAS, NEVADA (dpa) – Just a year ago Thomas Krens, director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation hardly wasted a thought on Las Vegas, the gambling paradise in the Nevada Desert.
“I could hardly imagine working together with Las Vegas as an exhibition location,” he said.
But he has changed his mind. In autumn 2001 the New York Guggenheim Museum will open a branch in Las Vegas in cooperation with the Hermitage Museum of St. Petersburg, Russia.
“Today I believe Las Vegas offers a unique opportunity to communicate with an audience of millions from all over the world,” said Krens.
Anyone with rank and reputation in New York or Hollywood is currently staking a claim in the Nevada Desert – and sometimes they are too late.
Top international chefs have conquered the city which was once known only for casino buffets and the neon lights of fast food chains. The idea was that nothing should distract people from playing black jack or roulette.
But today McDonalds, Burger King and Starbucks share the strip with French restaurants and expensive boutiques.
Culture is taking priority for the city fathers. Picassos and Renoirs hang in the Hotel Bellagio.
The new Guggenheim-Hermitage will be built by Dutch star architect Rem Kohlhaas. The first exhibition in August will show impressionist and modern masters from the collections of both museums, including Chagall, Kandinsky, Matisse, Monet, Picasso and Renoir.
What has happened? In 1995, the film Leaving Las Vegas, still portrayed a Las Vegas in which the main character, played by Nicholas Cage, chose to drink himself to death. But even back then it was astounding what had gone up “in the middle of nowhere” – sometimes with dirty money, certainly with the money of failed adventurers.
Las Vegas, and the state of Nevada, for a long time lived on its national gambling monopoly. But in the early 1990s a number of other U.S. states legalized black jack and roulette too.
Las Vegas suffered considerable difficulties – and reacted with breathtaking speed. It transformed itself from a city of professional gamblers and failures into an adult Disneyland.
Within just a few years, giant theme hotels were built in the desert for billions of dollars. Every hotel is a town in its own right. The largest on the strip, the MGM Grand, has 5,500 rooms and suites.
“Las Vegas today is the best of two worlds,” said a passer-by, who was being photographed in front of a copper green Statue of Liberty by his companion. The New World is represented by the New York, New York hotel complex with its Manhattan skyline that towers imposingly, if not in original size, over the strip.
The Old World is represented at the Hotel Venetian on the Las Vegas Strip, where tourists from Chicago and San Francisco wander over a faithful replica of St. Mark’s Square in Venice.
Venetian gondolas glide through narrow canals through the hotel while tourists walk over picturesque bridges, craning their necks to see a copy of Michelangelo’s “Creation of Adam”. Who cares if the original is not in Venice but in the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican?
The mighty black pyramid of the Hotel Luxor takes visitors back to a long-forgotten age. Archaeologists have created an extremely faithful, original-size replica of Tutankhamen’s tomb.
The sarcophagus and burial objects are exactly the way archaeologist Howard Carter found them when he entered the chamber in the Valley of the Kings with just a candle in his hand on November 2, 1922.
The construction boom in Las Vegas appears to be over for the time being.
Plans for the Titanic, a theme hotel based on the ill-fated ocean liner, have disappeared into investors’ filing cabinets. Even if the hotels here are generally 90-per-cent booked, no one can really believe another mega-complex with thousands more beds would pay off.
But nothing stands still in Las Vegas. Hotel managers are falling over themselves with offers of crazy roller coasters and water games as well as expensive, exclusive offers for high earners.
Every regional cuisine is catered for here, be it Indian, Italian or Irish. Two restaurants, the Picasso and the Renoir, have even been awarded five stars by the Mobil Travel Guide – an honour shared by only two dozen in the whole of the United States.
But such expensive investments must be made to pay off. The Hotel Bellagio alone cost over 2 billion dollars. Hotel managers have taken drastic but effective action: they have abolished the night.
At midnight in the theme hotels woolly clouds still hang in the artificial blue sky. As local tourism official Rob Powers said, a hotel that opens in Las Vegas, only closes again when it is bombed to the ground.
Information in the Internet at http://www.lasvegasfreedom.com
