Next Showplace in Vegas May Be a Guggenheim

In its continuing evolution from adult playground to family vacation spot, Las Vegas will next attempt to solidify its fledgling cultural credentials.

The Guggenheim Museum and the Venetian Resort-Hotel-Casino are negotiating a deal to create a new Guggenheim branch on an empty lot alongside the extravagant, faux-Italian, $1.5-billion hotel. The 35,000-square-foot building, being designed by the renowned radical Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, will serve as a venue for shows from the New York-based museum.

The plan would make the expansion-minded Guggenheim the first major art museum with a permanent presence in Las Vegas and would mark the only significant collaboration between such an institution and a casino-hotel chain in the United States.

The museum recently confirmed its intention to bring its “Art of the Motorcycle” show to the resort but it was vague about precisely where and when it would be exhibited. The new venue is scheduled for completion next spring, and Los Angeles architect Frank Gehry is slated to design the exhibition. Guggenheim Director Thomas Krens has yet to set a date for the opening of the inaugural show.

Kurt Ouchida, spokesman for the 1-year-old Venetian, said Thursday that no deal had been signed yet, but “it’s exhilarating and exciting to partner” with the museum. Krens declined to comment on the project.

And the Guggenheim’s plans for Las Vegas may go beyond the Koolhaas gallery. Gehry, who first worked with Krens on the wildly successful Guggenheim branch in Bilbao, Spain, said the two have talked to Venetian owner Sheldon Adelson about inserting a full-scale museum in a major addition to the hotel.

The Guggenheim venture is by no means Las Vegas’ first foray into high culture. When he was chairman of Mirage Resorts, Steve Wynn included a commercial gallery in his $1.6-billion Bellagio resort, a block down the Strip from the Venetian. When it opened in 1998, the 3,000 room, 16-restaurant resort was considered the most opulent in Las Vegas. Its Gallery of Fine Art--with paintings and sculpture by the likes of Renoir, Van Gogh and Picasso widely valued at about $400 million--attracted 2,000 customers a day on average, with out-of-state tourists paying $12 for admission, Nevada residents half that. By contrast, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art averaged 3,176 daily visitors in 1999.

When the MGM Grand purchased Mirage Resorts earlier this year, the Bellagio gallery was shut down and the collection split between Wynn and the resort. Representatives of the MGM Grand have said there are plans to reopen the gallery as a home to traveling art exhibits.

“It is a pivotal time to take advantage of what the Bellagio art museum started,” Ouchida says. “Culture is here to stay. People are finding that as Las Vegas reinvents itself--in dining and in shopping and retail--it’s now gaining a worthwhile reputation as a place where you can actually seek culture, away from the typical stereotypes that have plagued Las Vegas for a long time.”

But to art world insiders, the mixing of a nonprofit museum with the commercial resort business is considered audacious.

“All of this is based on the presumption that art is a spectator sport, like a tractor pull,” says Dave Hickey, art critic and professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “You’re not in the museum business anymore. You’re a carnival. To me, it was very nice when a museum could offer you a refuge--from commerce, from education, from fashion.”

Such concerns are shared by Gehry as he considers architecture’s role in Las Vegas’ increasingly theme-park-like streetscape.

“I worry about that kind of context,” Gehry says. “There may be a way to do it, but the fear is that it would all just become another theme, whether you like it or not.”

Koolhaas, who in April won architecture’s Pritzker Prize, is hardly the stereotypical Las Vegas architect. For the Guggenheim-Venetian gallery, he is designing a concrete-and-steel “container” that will stand alongside the hotel’s parking garage. The structure--conceived as a raw, warehouse-like space--will stand in stark contrast to the ornate decor of the grandiose hotel building.

Las Vegas, meanwhile, is only part of a grander scheme to transform the Guggenheim into the world’s first truly global art museum. Sources say Krens is about to name Koolhaas the museum’s director of architecture and strategic planning in order to work on an array of proposed branches around the world. Gehry, who has already designed a proposed new $450-million Guggenheim building for lower Manhattan, will join the team as an informal consultant. Among their future projects: a branch in St. Petersburg, Russia, built in partnership with the State Hermitage Museum.

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Times staff writers Tom Gorman in Las Vegas and Paul Lieberman in New York contributed to this story.