Las Vegas Art: It’s Not an Oxymoron

When retired Los Angeles television writer Mel Tolkin and his wife, Edith, told friends they were coming here for a Smithsonian Institution-sponsored tour of art and architecture, “the hoots of derisive laughter could be heard across the nation,” she said.

But after spending much of this week here, the Tolkins and 32 other cultural tourists declared they had gained a new appreciation for a town that they mostly had known only for its glitz and fakery.

In fact, some concluded, maybe that glitz and fakery is art, too--Las Vegas style. “High cheese,” is what tour participant Kate McDonnell of Chicago called it.

To Vegas boosters, this week’s inaugural tour--with more scheduled next year--is evidence that Sin City has arrived. The Smithsonian, after all, is arguably the premier arbiter of high culture in America.

“To have one of the world’s major cultural institutions include us in their programming acknowledges Las Vegas as a dynamic, creative, emerging cultural site,” said Richard Hooker, a “cultural specialist” for the city who led the local tour. “We are now recognized as being part of the important cultural landscape of America.”

Smithsonian officials apparently agree.

“Our participants are cultural devotees, and they trust us to take them to important places,” said program coordinator Cheryl Ann Lytle.

A cultural tour of Las Vegas, needless to say, is no dreary trail of museums. Instead, stops included:

* A performance by the Sierra Winds, the local university’s faculty wind quintet, of “Casino,” an imaginative piece featuring recorded overlays of beeping slot machines.

* The Venetian Resort Hotel-Casino, where they learned that faces depicted in the statuary and medallions decorating the imposing exterior were modeled after the artists themselves and the children of the hotel’s owner.

* A meeting with a sequined showgirl, who explained how she leads a rather ordinary life by day and performs topless by night.

* Picassos hanging in a dining room of the Bellagio resort.

* Historic neon signs of the 1950s on display downtown, seen by some as an emerging art form.

“I can’t believe I’m liking this,” admitted Darlene Carroll of Minneapolis. “I’d been here once before, and I swore I’d never, never come back.”

Indeed, many participants said they had previously avoided Las Vegas. But under the wings of the Smithsonian, a tour focusing on the evolution of art in this place, much maligned by highbrows, was too intriguing to pass up.

The Smithsonian offers more than 300 international and 150 domestic tours annually. From Washington’s art nouveau to Delaware’s Andrew Wyeth country, Los Angeles’ Getty Center to New York’s Metropolitan Opera, the tours have proven hugely popular among members of the Smithsonian Associates.

When it added Las Vegas to the offerings, the trip quickly sold out, and the waiting list will fill two more tours next year, said program coordinator Lytle.

The tour included the Arts Factory, a collection of funky galleries filled with local artworks in an aging downtown building that once served as a crematory.

“There’s a huge art community here dying to be seen,” said local artist Caroleanne Kulla, beaming as the tour members reviewed her pieces. “Until now, nobody who appreciates art has wanted to come to Las Vegas. They think everyone here is lost in sin.”

The tour also included the home studios of local artists, which fascinated the group as a chance to snoop around real Las Vegas homes.

“I was aware of the fascination people have” for Las Vegas, artist Mark Brandvik said as the group moved from room to room--even into the bathroom--and gave its collective approval to his interior decorating. “But I think this is the first time we’ve had a tour bus stop in my neighborhood.”

Artist Wayne Littlejohn at one point warned the group that much of the city’s sublime art is easily overshadowed by the outrageous. “We’re a city with little treasures,” he said. “A Buddhist shrine in front of Caesars Palace gets lost in the combination of fantasy and artistic license to create here. Nothing is too much in Las Vegas.”

Among the challenges of planning the tour, said Hooker, was to include “the conflict of art in Las Vegas--the high art, the low art, the popular versus high architecture. Las Vegas is a series of contradictions.”

Indeed, there was no confusing this tour with the one that visits Frank Lloyd Wright’s Wisconsin.

Members of the group chortled as they passed the wedding chapels--and alerted like Labrador retrievers when they spotted a bridal party entering one.

“Hey look, there’s a pirate village,” said one as the bus passed Treasure Island. And, in the next block: “Oooh, look--Neiman Marcus!”

And more than a few noticed the downtown billboard promoting a local comic and his “Naked Angels.”

“I think the art of the old masters is out of place here,” concluded Susan Bralove, a Washington architect. And while “I’m concerned that the [Strip] architecture reflects society’s superficial values . . . I have to say, it’s effective for its purpose.”

“This is all art,” said tour participant Richard Carroll of Minneapolis. “Whether you like it or not, it’s unique in the world. It doesn’t need any excuses.”