Will the Guggenheim Museum Visit Las Vegas on a Harley?

The Guggenheim Museum already has a branch in the real Venice--so why not an exhibition at the Venetian Resort-Hotel-Casino?

Officials of the New York-based art museum and the 3,036-room luxury complex confirmed this week that they are negotiating to bring the Guggenheim’s most successful show ever to the Vegas Strip. It’s not a display of Picassos but “The Art of the Motorcycle.”

Featuring more than 100 motorcycles, the exhibition debuted in New York two years ago and currently is parked at the Guggenheim’s acclaimed Frank Gehry-designed museum in Bilbao, Spain. Thomas Krens, the expansion-minded director of the Guggenheim, said he is looking for two more locations to display the motorcycles after the Bilbao show ends in September and that Las Vegas is a candidate to be the first--if a deal providing a proper display area can be worked out with the Venetian.

“There are issues of space, [but] it’s an interesting idea,” Krens said. “I can say we’re interested.”

“There have been talks,” said hotel spokesman Kurt Ouchida.

Not long ago, the partnership of such an establishment museum and a Las Vegas enterprise would have been unthinkable. But the ground rules have changed on both sides to the degree that such an arrangement seems almost logical today.

It was two years ago, after all, that this city’s most flamboyant casino promoter, Steve Wynn, used classical museum art--Renoirs, Van Goghs and the like--to lend cachet to his $1.6-billion Bellagio hotel and casino.

During the same time, Krens has been tweaking his colleagues in the museum world by unabashedly embracing a promoter’s mentality. Comparing museums to amusement parks that must have “five rides” to be successful, he speaks of the need for “eating opportunities” and “shopping opportunities” in addition to art. There also seems to be no end to his worldwide deal making--this spring, he unveiled a proposal for a Gehry-designed riverside Guggenheim in lower Manhattan and just last week announced a “collaboration agreement” with Russia’s vaunted State Hermitage Museum to share collections and launch other ventures.

Krens has been moving ahead in Venice, as well, where his museum already has an outpost displaying the eclectic collection accumulated by the late Peggy Guggenheim. In December, plans were announced for a full Venice Guggenheim Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, to open in three years in the Italian city’s 17th Century Customs House, a prime location on the Grand Canal.

That may be part of his logic for negotiating with the Venetian, the $1.5-billion slice of faux Italy opened by entrepreneur Sheldon Adelson last year, complete with simulated canals and gondoliers.

Even without the Venice connection, “The Art of the Motorcycle” would be a safe bet to draw on The Strip. The show broke all attendance records for the Guggenheim when it opened in the landmark Fifth Avenue museum in 1998, the cycles displayed on the spiral ramps designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Including everything from a steam-powered Micheaux-Perreaux of 1868 to latter-day Harleys, the exhibition attracted 5,000 people a day on weekends and more than 300,000 overall in its 75-day run.

Though the BMW-sponsored show generated some predictable controversy--one critic termed it “least-common-denominator braggadocio”--it got generally favorable reviews. Art in America magazine termed it “an important marker in the shifting relationship of popular and high culture.”

Krens said he is hoping to finalize the new exhibition site within the next 10 days.

“You can’t wait forever,” he said. “September’s around the corner.”

But even with all the Guggenheim’s expansion of late, he insisted there are no plans at the moment to broaden such a temporary exhibition into a permanent Guggenheim site in Las Vegas.

“That’s not a possibility right now,” he said.

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The Guggenheim show would be coming to Las Vegas in the wake of the dismantling of the most prominent art display to date on The Strip--but with promises of new ones to come.

Many of the Impressionist and modern works in Wynn’s Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art were sold recently following the $6.4-billion purchase of his Mirage Resorts Inc. by rival MGM Grand.

Wynn owned some of the paintings, however, and has purchased others, hoping to display them eventually on his newly bought Desert Inn property, where he has proposed building twin 3,000-room hotel towers.

With his old Bellagio gallery sitting vacant, meanwhile, the new MGM Grand owners say they have invited “a few of the major museums” to consider sending traveling exhibitions, or currently undisplayed art, to the viewing space that Wynn filled with works such as a Picasso portrait of his mistress Dora Maar or Van Gogh’s “Peasant Woman Against a Background of Wheat.”

Two prominent local art historians argued Tuesday that more conventional museum exhibitions might fill a greater need than Krens’ motorcycles in a city that already is a capital of popular culture.

“I think [the Guggenheim] should show the toughest most sophisticated art that it’s got because that would quench the particular cultural thirst that exists in this part of the desert,” said Libby Lumpkin, who was the founding curator of the Bellagio gallery and will teach this fall at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Lumpkin’s husband, art critic Dave Hickey, similarly worried that the motorcycle exhibition--however edgy it might have seemed in Manhattan--might come too close to “pandering” in Las Vegas, if not “condescending cultural imperialism . . .

“We have a NASCAR installation here. It would certainly fit right in,” Hickey said.

“Bringing motorcycles to Las Vegas--we need that about as much as we need more hookers. It would be nice to have it. I’m sure it was gorgeous [in New York]. But I can’t imagine the cultural agenda . . . except for the gate receipts.”