Opening juxtaposes sublime masters and flashy motorcycles.

Typically, art museums in American cities have arisen as the embodiment of civic aspiration and an expression of local pride. This has been the pattern in older metropolises like New York and younger ones like L.A. as well as in smaller cities from Portland, Ore., to Portland, Maine.

There’s no reason to expect the arrival of a new art museum in Las Vegas to follow typical patterns, though, as this has never been remotely close to being a typical city. The decision by New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum to open a two-part branch at the Venetian Resort Hotel Casino on the Las Vegas Strip says more about Manhattan’s established role as the national consumption center for art than it does about the cultural life of Sin City.

Sunday, the Guggenheim Las Vegas and the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum will open their doors to the public after a five-week construction delay.

The Guggenheim Las Vegas is housed in a vast hangar-like space wedged between the Venetian’s casino and its parking lot. There is no exterior facade, but it doesn’t need one. The industrial-chic design, which opens directly onto the casino, is so radically different from the gilded-and-draped faux-Venetian stage-set style of the hotel as to be its own billboard.

The Guggenheim Hermitage Museum is a collaboration between the Guggenheim and the legendary State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, which houses one of the largest and finest encyclopedic art collections in the world. Located out front, near the hotel entry, the four 1,500 square-foot galleries are sheathed in Cor-Ten steel inside and out. Like the enormous 63,700-square-foot space off the casino, which architect Rem Koolhaas has dubbed the Big Box, the rusty brown steel of the so-called Jewel Box also announce its presence through stark architectural difference. That difference applies to its origins. Neither the Guggenheim Las Vegas nor the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum was conceived with the local citizenry in mind, in spite of an explosive growth in the city’s population during the last 10 or 15 years. (Every busboy and keno runner can tell you that Vegas is the nation’s fastest-growing city.) These are art museums designed for the tourist trade, pure and simple. They’re another roadside attraction.

I say this without derision and only with an eye toward honest identification of what has arisen on the Strip. In fact, I’m here to help. In a place where one talks of going to Siegfried & Roy or Mandalay Bay, no tourist destination will survive for long with a long marbles-in-the-mouth name like the Guggenheim Las Vegas and Guggenheim Hermitage Museum. The places need a sobriquet or handle. I nominate GuggenVegas.

Two exhibitions inaugurate GuggenVegas, both on view into the spring. “The Art of the Motorcycle” has been touring since the summer of 1998 and it arrives here like the glossy road company of a big Broadway musical. “Masterpieces and Master Collectors: Impressionist and Early Modern Paintings from the Hermitage and Guggenheim Museums” is a tight selection of 44 paintings that includes some of the greatest works of its era.

The familiar conceit for “Masterpieces and Master Collectors” is that great collectors have an effect on great artists, as well as on the formation of great art museums. It rehearses once again the oft-told tales of legendary Moscow collectors Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov early in the 20th century, and--slightly later--of Solomon R. Guggenheim, his niece Peggy and Justin Thannhauser in New York. In general, the Russians kept their eye on art in France, while the New Yorkers added Germany.

Familiar conceit or not, the show has enough breathtaking pictures, especially from St. Petersburg, that no excuse is needed to revel in them. In one room at the beginning there’s a first-rate crash course on the portraiture, landscapes and still life paintings of Paul Cezanne. A wall at the back lines up three pivotal paintings by Vasily Kandinsky which together chart his explosive shift from descriptive landscape into emotive abstraction in the pivotal years between 1910 and 1912. In between are assorted individual gems--Claude Monet, Pierre Bonnard, Robert-Victor-Felix Delaunay etc.--making up at least half the show.

Among them are four of the greatest early pictures by Henri Matisse. “Nymph and Satyr,” “Still Life With ‘The Dance,”’ “Standing Moroccan in Green” and “Portrait of the Artist’s Wife”--this last a tough contender for the unofficial title of Greatest Modern Portrait--offer a rare opportunity to explore in depth Matisse’s crudely elegant Expressionist sensuality without traveling halfway round the world.

Still, there’s an even better, more important picture in the show. Among the six excellent paintings by Pablo Picasso is “Three Women,” his monumental Cubist work from 1908. For the Hermitage to lend this ur -object, which was once owned by Gertrude Stein, is a bit like New York’s Museum of Modern Art sending Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” on the road. You can’t quite believe it has happened.

“Three Women” is Cubism’s three graces. Picasso meant to do nothing less than to remake art for a new century, one defined by constant flux. The picture brilliantly accommodates monumental solidity to the shifting vagaries of time and space.

The classical Greek ideal of beauty gets scraped back to pre-historic origins, then rebuilt into an ambitious, aggressively modern composition of dynamic repose. Using a hatched brushstroke that resembles chisel marks in stone, Picasso carved his primitive sleeping nymphs--inspired by Cezanne’s late “Bathers”--from great faceted chunks of red-brown rock and thalo-green forest. Their poses, with bent arm raised behind the head like a bony pillow, slide back in Western art history through Michelangelo’s marble slaves all the way to the 5th century BC “Dying Niobid.”

“Three Women,” like the other paintings, is hung directly on the gallery’s steel walls. (It suffers a bit from the similarity between the steel’s velvety brown color and the picture’s ruddy umber hues.) Koolhaas devised a clever system of heavy-duty magnetic picture-hangers to affix the canvases to the steel. The result is both profoundly elegant and sharply amusing--actual masterpieces deployed like refrigerator magnets.

By rather stark contrast, “The Art of the Motorcycle” over at the Big Box is not much different from a show about “The Art of the Doorknob”--more romantic and elaborate, perhaps, but intellectually as dull. Anything fabricated by a human being obviously possesses an element of art, but unless an artist or an architect is directly involved (think furniture, especially), the level of art is generally low.

This much I can say about the GuggenVegas motorcycle show: All but one of the 130 bikes has two wheels and an engine, while most are very shiny.

Industrial design innovations tend to be technical, like the scale of the engine relative to the bike’s frame, the uniqueness of a valve gear or an innovation in materials. Aesthetically, though, there are only so many ways to skin a motorized two-wheeled cat. Tracing 140 years of motorcycle art history, the show quickly blurs into redundancy and repetitiveness.

Much more interesting is the installation design--conceived, not incidentally, by an architect, Santa Monica’s Frank Gehry. It begins with four 19th century examples that are actually just bicycles (and one tricycle) with motors clumsily attached, which Gehry has wittily mounted atop chunky pedestals of rough-hewn wood. The lumber neatly emphasizes their antiquated nature.

The rest of his design is a spectacular phantasmagoria of chrome plates, translucent glass, steel mesh and strobe lights, which encapsulates all you need to know about a motorcycle’s modern meaning. Gehry uses these machine materials to fracture, reflect and diffuse light, creating sexy, highly organic, frankly theatrical forms, from billowing clouds and monumental floral blossoms to great curtain swags. Glamour and erotic thrill summarize the motorcycle aesthetic.

Speaking of erotic glamour: That’s the steady undercurrent that’s always brought tourists to Las Vegas, yet there’s no shortage of irony in the post-Sept. 11 timing of the GuggenVegas launch. An art museum conceived exclusively for the tourist trade has opened at the most precarious moment for tourism that this constantly metamorphosing vacation mecca has ever seen. GuggenVegas isn’t likely to be the draw that gets hordes of vacationers back into the RV or the airport, though the presence of great paintings from the Hermitage should attract the hard-core art crowd.

But then, GuggenVegas was never intended to lure people to the Strip. It was designed instead to lure people from the Strip. GuggenVegas plainly means to take advantage of the 37 million tourists who usually stream past the Venetian’s front door each year. Admission is $15. If the two spaces can lure just 10% of those tourists--putting annual attendance in a league with the greatest art museum in the nation, New York’s vast Metropolitan Museum of Art--that’s more than $100 million annually at the gate.

And that doesn’t even include revenue from sales of refrigerator magnets in the gift shop.

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“Masterpieces and Master Collectors,” Guggenheim Hermitage Museum, through April 7; “The Art of the Motorcycle,” Guggenheim Las Vegas, through June; Venetian Resort, 3355 Las Vegas Blvd. South; (702) 414-2440. Open daily, 9 a.m. to 11 p.m.