Word: hotels
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Disney World of terminal public greed--is a city in which every cultural citation is fake, so that the real thing feels out of place. The city is built on simulation, quotation, weird unconvincing displacements, in which cultural icons are endlessly but never convincingly quoted. Here is the Luxor Hotel, that huge silly pyramid with its plaster Anubises and fiber-glass Amon-Ras, its cavernous interior housing a facsimile of the Manhattan skyline. Here, under construction, is a casino in the form of the Doges Palace in Venice, complete with a small-scale version of the Campanile bearing a replica...
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...
...luxury, of control over Nature, to Vegas entrepreneurs as it was to the Umayyad caliphs who began building the fountains of the Alhambra on a dry hillside near Granada 12 centuries ago. Nobody grasps this better than Wynn. To install performing 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...
Never mind that Wall Street is wobbly, that Asia's gamblers are currency shocked or that most Americans are already no more than a tank of gas away from the nearest blackjack table. Las Vegas is on a $7 billion building jag, with 18 major hotel and casino projects scheduled to open before 2000. By the millennium, Vegas will have more rooms than New York City, Paris or Los Angeles and more slots than the U.S. Postal Service...
...word for such a collection: overhead. Even before the market tanked, analysts were marking down casino stocks on the fundamentals--too much capacity--and they are worried that this latest building boom will crap out. The Vegas Valley, for instance, is heading into a glut of 127,000 hotel rooms--up a scary 20% from the current level. That's one reason gaming stocks such as Mirage's have lost one-third to one-half of their value in the past year. The weakening global economy is also taking its toll. The high rollers from Asia, the focus...