Where I Stand -- Brian Greenspun: In Las Vegas, pettiness has become an art form

THERE IS a price of admission to the world of art. It is a price worth paying.

With all hell breaking loose around the world and inside the Beltway, Las Vegans have managed to find something to be petty about on a couple of fronts. If it was for distraction from the more substantive issues of the day, I'd understand, but methinks that is not the case. So pettiness once again will rise to the level of substance, and so will follow the public's dutiful attention.

One issue is a ridiculous decision by an Ethics Board member that says an elected official cannot vote on a matter involving a friend. No matter how much that official believes he or she can be impartial, the answer is no way, no vote. Taken to its logical conclusion, a commissioner can vote only for someone he or she doesn't know or knows but doesn't like.

Friends and acquaintances need not apply no matter how competent they are or how exciting the idea they wish to pursue. Enemies, on the other hand, can apply all they want, but don't expect human nature to give you a break. Whatever happened to making decisions on the merits and letting the voters determine the quality of those votes at the next election?

But I digress from the issue that I really want to talk about today. And that is the pursuit of art in the city of Las Vegas and the price of admission to that most beautiful, challenging and inspiring of worlds.

It is public and most gratifying knowledge that Mirage Resorts Chairman Steve Wynn and his latest creation, the Bellagio, will showcase the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art when that hotel opens its doors to the public in the middle of October. While there are art galleries sprinkled around our community to share their own versions of the art world's masterful beauty, nothing we have ever seen here can come close to matching what Bellagio will bring to the public's consciousness. Not by a long shot.

Wynn and his company have spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $300 million so far to amass a collection of impressionist to pop art that is guaranteed to suck the breath from even the most nonchalant of what will be millions of visitors to the latest spectacle on the Las Vegas Strip. I am far from a connoisseur of such things but I do know that the few paintings I have seen that will hang in the gallery are nothing short of breathtaking. I can just imagine the feelings that will stir in the young hearts and minds of the schoolchildren who will visit the Bellagio collection as part of the daily field trips that will open to them a world -- many worlds -- they previously could only dream about.

Marcel Proust once wrote, "Only through art can we get outside of ourselves and know another's view of the universe which is not the same as ours and see landscapes which would have otherwise remained unknown to us like the landscapes of the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing a single world, our own, we see it multiply until we have before us as many worlds as there are original artists."

Many of those worlds, those universes, those unbelievably vivid landscapes of the imagination will hang in the Bellagio Gallery for the public to see and enjoy, and by which our own schoolchildren might be inspired beyond our most pleasant expectations.

The question of the day, though, is how much it will cost us.

In 1997, the Nevada State Legislature provided a significant sales-tax exemption for any person who places an expensive piece of art on display for the public for a certain number of hours each week for nine months. The law was backed, indeed conceived, by Wynn and, so far, he appears to be the only person who has applied to take advantage of the tax breaks it allows. That doesn't mean, however, that there won't be more collectors who will be suitably inspired to buy and place their unique works of art on public display in Nevada. For a state woefully under-galleried, we can only hope.

In any event, the debate now rages about the definition of "public." The state wants the Bellagio to allow the public into its small but oh so spectacular gallery for free. The Bellagio wants to charge a reasonable entrance fee. And to prove its case, the hotel cites practically every major gallery in the country that charges similar fees to the public, fees that are used to defray the costs of operating those galleries. State officials are balking at the prospect of charging anything, saying that the tax break should be a sufficient quid pro quo for unlimited entry to the public.

If Wynn had not committed his hotel to a free program for Clark County's schoolchildren similar to that which he provides for the dolphins and Siegfried and Roy's magnificent animals, there might be a case to be made for free admission to the public. And, if Wynn had not committed to donate every penny collected by the gallery, after operating expenses, to local charities, a case for free admission could also be made. But it still could not withstand the test of logic.

For logic tells us that any art museum or gallery that wants to come to Nevada in the future and avail itself of the tax incentives for fine art will have to charge an admission fee. Otherwise, it will not survive. To interpret the word "public" to mean free, therefore, the state would be undermining any legislative intent or effort to motivate other collectors to make their precious works available for Nevadans, and that, while not a first for some in this state, would be illogical and unwise.

In the end, if Wynn gets a tax break for starting a ball rolling in our community toward a higher purpose, then I say bully for him and hooray for the rest of us. He's risking his money for his benefit, which coincides with a benefit for the entire community. That's called win-win, and no one should be so petty as to call it something else.

Unless they want to open a museum of fine art themselves and give it to the public for free!

archive