Word: wynn
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...Vegas hasn't earned a name for being culturally underoxygenated, what place in America has? If the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City can hang banners advertising Tiepolo or Goya from its Fifth Avenue facade without having fingers wagged in its face, why shouldn't Steve Wynn, the modern-day Mike Todd or P.T. Barnum of Vegas, the man with more clout in the gambling-and-hotel business than anyone alive with the possible exception of Donald Trump, run Van Gogh and Picasso on the billboard for his new flagship hotel, the Bellagio, which cost $1.6 capital...
...there goes the Bellagio, sailing into the teeth of the gathering global gale, with 3,000 of the highest-priced rooms in Vegas and something like $300 million worth of works of art nailed to its mast. All bought, over a little more than two years, by Stephen A. Wynn, 56, who had never collected anything except casino real estate and golf courses before--and who is, moreover, gradually losing his sight to retinitis pigmentosa, an irreversible, degenerative eye disease...
...Wynn is a showman in the classic, big-ticket American tradition. He fantasizes about turning Las Vegas around, taking the capital of American kitsch and transforming it into a full-scale class act, with high-cultural overtones. Whether he will succeed in this is anyone's guess, but no one can accuse him of not putting his (and his shareholders') money where his mouth is, in a town where "Art" is normally the name of someone's limo driver...
...began, like most neophyte collectors who have a bundle to spend, with the easy, lovable stuff: Impressionism, and specifically Renoir. But rather than dive in at the deep end of the art market on his own--a certain prelude to drowning--Wynn found himself a guide in William Acquavella, 60, a closemouthed and formidably well-connected New York private dealer whose stockroom is one of the best in the U.S. Acquavella impressed on Wynn that in the art market, there are no bargains: he would have to pay top dollar for top works. The big test of this came with...
Some things came by luck and were grabbed on the wing. Wynn relishes describing how he and Acquavella were in London to conclude the deal on a Tahitian Gauguin, Bathers. With time to kill, they dropped in on the small upstairs gallery of Thomas Gibson, a private dealer in Old Bond Street. And there, on an easel, was a painting that had just come in on consignment a few hours before: Degas's pastel Dancer Taking a Bow, 1887, one of the finest of his ballet scenes, which had been in one of the collections of the Rothschild family...