Word: bellagio
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...Goghs, Peasant Woman Against a Background of Wheat, painted a few weeks before the artist's suicide at Auvers-sur-Oise in 1890. This exceptional portrait had been hanging on loan in the Metropolitan Museum, and it cost Wynn a nonnegotiable $47.5 million of his own money, not the Bellagio's. (So far, Wynn's Mirage Resorts Inc. has picked up $160 million of the tab for the collection, and Wynn himself the rest...
Absent a real museum, or the civic will to build and endow one, perhaps the only way to habituate fine art to Las Vegas--and vice versa--is to do what Wynn has done in the Bellagio: build a sort of treasure box in the core of the hotel, to which limited numbers of the public will be admitted at $10 a head, hotel guests and high rollers preferred, so that the art itself becomes a spectacle with overtones of privilege and thus matches up with the imagery of the rest of the city. It recalls Marianne Moore's famous...
...fully realize how much water matters in Vegas until you see the works of Kublai Wynn, the Bellagio especially. Never was a city built and embellished in such opposition to its own environment. The Mormons tried settling this parched valley, nothing but dust, rocks and Gila monsters, in the 1850s; they failed. In 1905 it was set up as a dry-gulch railroad town handling transshipments of fruits and vegetables from California to the Midwest. Labor strikes all but destroyed the railroad, and with it Las Vegas, in the 1920s. And then, in the '30s, three things made the place...
...dolphins in huge saltwater tanks in a hotel in the Nevada desert seems, on the face of it, about as rational as filling a cruise ship with sand and camels, but it has its own value as spectacle. And nowhere in Vegas is water as spectacular as at the Bellagio, which rises 36 stories, clean and shiny as a new toy freshly unpacked, from the shore of an eight-acre artificial lake symbolizing Lake Como, complete with hundreds of fountains shooting their jets 200 ft. into the air to the accompaniment of operatic arias...
...machine works. But what is the view across the lake going to look like, once Hilton has finished its own contribution to the urban mix, the Paris Las Vegas, with a half-size replica of the Eiffel Tower right across from the shores of Bellagio? Don't ask. Never mind. For sure, it won't have any Picassos...