No ‘Butts’ About It, This Statue’s Raising Eyebrows

Sure, Rome may have the Pieta and Paris the Mona Lisa, but when it comes to true artistic achievement, historians will now have to look to Las Vegas.

This week, the Riviera Hotel and Casino unveiled a life-size bronze statue of seven showgirl butts.

Call it “Moon over Las Vegas.”

The 1,540-pound publicity stunt, which stands along the Strip, is modeled after a risque billboard for the casino’s Crazy Girls dance troupe. Like the billboard, it has aroused some strange reactions.

The National Organization for Women, which picketed the unveiling Tuesday, claims the faceless sculpture dehumanizes females. “Women are people, too,” said the protesters’ signs.

But the Las Vegas Review-Journal editorialized that the statue celebrates “a competing vision of female ‘liberation’ . . . [in which] the ability of an ‘exotic dancer’ to manipulate a group of puppyish men actually empowers women.”

Pretty heavy stuff for a city known for Elvis impersonators, drive-through wedding chapels and a Liberace museum. Then again, not everyone sees the statue in such esoteric terms.

Newspaper columnist John L. Smith regards it as a sort of giant, hormonal rabbit’s foot. “They say it’s good luck to rub Buddha’s belly or a bald man’s head, but the bronze statue of the shapely derrieres of the Riviera’s Crazy Girls show takes fortune hunting to a whole other level,” he wrote.

Artist Michael Conine, who made plaster molds of the dancers’ rumps to create the statue, says he hopes it will be taken more seriously than that.

He already has a following: “I’ve had a lot of people volunteer to help with the next one.”