Opening Aria II: Food & Art

In sorting through how to present the many images from the opening of Aria last week, I found a strong emphasis in my photography on food and art/artistic visuals. The above, for instance, was the display that greeted Aria opening night VIP party guests. Here's the label...


...and here's another image of same.


There was a lot of food that I do not eat, namely foie gras and any meat or fishy thing that's uncooked. That's why I was so excited to find at the Union Bar off from the casino they were doing sliders. Very delicious sliders. Sliders that I simply assumed were some special cut of beef. Until I stepped into the light and realized that these sliders were...


...veal. Which I do not eat. Not because I don't like the taste -- which is why I have the heebie jeebies about uncooked meat and fish -- but for the same reason that I don't eat foie gras. That is, both are foods that cannot be made without being incredibly cruel to animals for their entire short lives. It is true that I eat beef, pork, chicken and other meat that comes, frequently, from factory farms where the animals live painful and tormented lives. This is an ongoing problem for my conscience and I'm still working on how to address it, having found that I couldn't afford free-range meat on a regular basis when I tried a year ago. But there is no way to produce foie gras without force feeding a duck and no way to produce veal without permanently deprieving a calf of mobility.

So that was unfortunate. There was still plenty of yum abounding:





OK, that -- Jean Phillippe Patisserie The Sequel -- wasn't open. But it still looked delicious.

The one thing that I baffled over was actually not at the party at all but in the media center that occupied a ballroom at Vdara. I'd never had one of these...

...and had to ask people on Twitter how to eat it. (Answer: Cut in half, spoon out.)

OK, so the art. I don't think I fully understood even when I broke the story of the $40 million art program in the New York Times in early 2008 just how significant it would be. You've seen pictures everywhere of "Silver River" by Maya Lin (see my Sphere.Com profile of her from last week, too) and I've posted shots of the Nancy Rubins boat sculpture, the giant typewriter eraser, the Frank Stella at Vdara registration, the wonderful Vdara elevator area installations of stacked paper by Peter Wegner and the Henry Moore in Jim Murren's notorious pocket park.

Well, a few more now. These mammoth installations on the lobbies of Veer by Richard Long are really cool...


...as is this one hanging in Aria that is, sadly and weirdly, not listed in the CityCenter Fine Art Collection brochure that is intended as a self-guide:


It was also exciting, on a tour on Tuesday with curator Michele Quinn, to find out that they ended up picking up this...


...Tim Bavington for the high-limit slot area. That's cool because Bavington is actually a local, a British artist who came to UNLV to study with Dave Hickey and has seen his career flourish in the cradle of Vegas. His work has some relationship to radio frequencies and can be found in many prominent places in Vegas including in the dining room of Spago at Caesars Palace.

The piece below, which hangs over the cactus garden outside the entrances to Sirio, American Fish and Jean Georges Steakhouse, is by far my least favorite piece:


It's not in the brochure, of course, so I don't know who did it but it is part of the collection. To me, it is more design than art. Sorta tacky, really.

They don't view this as art, but the Lumia, the fountain out front of Aria, certainly ought to qualify. Not only does the interplay of color and water rivet...


...but how about what it looks like reflected under the nearby glass and steel overhangs:


WET, the folks behind the Lake of Dreams and the Bellagio Fountains, have five features, three at Aria and two at Crystals. This massive and lengthy one...


...at the Aria valet drive is just very pretty and really frames the mugshot of the hotel itself beautifully.

This one, though, was a dud.


That's Glacia at the Crystals. It's basically just columns of ice that form and melt. Zzzz. When we were first told about this, the PR folks made it sound like they would freeze and melt in midair or right before you. But, no, it takes all day. Nothing actually HAPPENS. And since they're encouraging people to touch it, I can't wait until it's 115 degrees outside and some drunk guy tries to climb one of the pillars or eat it or something.

Two more things. I know Hunter Hillegas of RateVegas.Com is sticking to his opinion that these card-sculpture walls in the Aria poker room are ugly...


...but I still think they're pretty and fun and whimsical.

And when I took my CityCenter tours in November for my stories, the PR folks didn't really know if all this exposed piping at this shop in Aria was intentional or whether it was just mid-construction.


Now that it's done, I have to say that this is a one of the coolest looking stores I've ever seen anywhere. I don't even know what they sell. I just love looking at it.

Friess: Comment

Wow, what a surprise to arrive here earlier after being awake for 24 hours of travel to find the kind of battle occurring in the comments of the prior post. I went and deleted the one obscene, completely ridiculous remark and then I wrote a response that Blogger didn't seem to post. That was frustrating, but Miles wouldn't let me rewrite it before we had a "brief" nap which became, well, all day.

I'll try to keep this brief, but I do need to answer remarks made here:

* Re: Steve Sebelius' comment about media criticism in Vegas from the last post: I stand partly corrected and will take his word for it on the points he makes about ad revenues and the history of Matt O'Brien's media column. But it still remains a loss to the community that there is no journalist in this city dedicated to media commentary the way other major cities have the likes of Michael Miner or Howard Kurtz. And it still is left to the Internet to be the more independent voices observing the press rather than the editor of a paper owned by the city's largest newspaper. As hard as Steve works, he is still a top official involved in one of these companies. It's very difficult for him to be seen as truly independent even as he genuinely strives to be.

* My alleged bias against the Sun. Take a good look at this blog. Take a look at all the entries related to the Las Vegas Sun. Here, I'll help you since you wish to make uninformed comments without any backup.  The vast majority of the time, I have great praise for the Sun. My time at the R-J taints me? Why would anything else you have to say be credible when my public record on this is so easy to access and so obviously not as you present it?

* The NYT piece in CityCenter. Yes, I spoke to several public arts experts, including Jack Bender, publisher of the Public Art Review and executive director of Forecast Public Art, as well as Richard Lynch of Americans for the Arts, the leading public-art non-profit. And there were others. But sometimes in journalism we interview lots of people we don't get to quote because (a) there's not enough space and (b) all the experts said pretty much the same thing. And what they said was (a) the MGM project was genuinely impressive in its ambition and scale and (b) it was most certainly public art in the sense that it will exist in spaces that are publicly available to anyone. In fact, that's one reason they're not putting any of it in the CityCenter casino; children can't go there. What's considered "public" is a bit different in Vegas than elsewhere; ordinary people know they can tramp through fancy lobbies and casinos and never feel out of place even if they don't spend a dime because it is customary here for people to do so. I've tried this in the lobby of the Mandarin Oriental in Hong Kong and was asked by some attendant whether I had a reservation. It's a different world. Furthermore, we journalists do strive for balance. That's why I called on the art critic Joan Altabe  of the Robb Report. She was the most virulently anti-Vegas-for-art in 2002 when I wrote about a Faberge exhibit at the Bellagio and, later, a Monet exhibit. And yet SHE said she was "dazzled" by the CityCenter effort and couldn't wait to come see it. So that felt like an art-world consensus to me that this was a credible and possible game-changing public art effort. That quote, too, was trimmed for space.

* My alleged Vegas-is-tacky posture: See my current Las Vegas Weekly column. I'm the guy in the mainstream media that is very, very quick to take note of unnecessary anti-Vegas bias and inaccuracy. The set-up of the NYT piece on public art actually came directly out of my interview with Maya Lin and two other artists. They were  terribly amused by the idea that they would be the least likely Vegas headliners. It's not anti-Vegas bias to note what the world expects of Vegas -- and I wonder who thought Sinatra was tacky anyhow!?! -- and toy with that.

* Re: Cliched anti-USAT bias: So it's wrong to point out Vegas' traditional history but it's OK to insult hundreds of journalists whose newspaper has vastly improved since, uh, the 1980s? I write longer pieces for USA Today nowadays than I do for the NYT. I am very proud of the pieces I did from China for USAT. The experience of crawling around a country where the press are brutally mistreated with a minimal grip on the language, relying on a network of friends and translators, and being able to turn around textured, lengthy pieces with sourcing from both China and the West (which meant working all night for days sometimes to reach those sources) was a great challenge and a terrific learning opportunity. The USAT staff nowadays is made up of Nieman fellows and Pulitzer winners. To insult its quality because of a 25-year-old reputation is like, well, calling Vegas tacky based in Excalibur.

* A 535-word correction is seriously newsworthy. It is the media's equivalent of a politician being shown to have or having admitted to have exhibited significant incompetence. The media doesn't just shrug when that happens and say, "Oh, OK. Carry on. Thanks for letting us know." Have there been longer? Sure, no doubt. But not that I know of here in Vegas, where I work and observe. And evidently the industry's trade publication, E&P, also saw it as news, which is saying something. And what's more, a newspaper that demands responses from its sources amid controversy has show it does not feel it ought to comment -- even to give a courteous no comment -- amid one of its own. That's hypocrisy, see. And there are many, many questions the public should be asking about the quality of its newspaper and the integrity of its editors in these circumstances. That's not personal any more than any other journalist gets personal covers any other controversy. It's what we do. But we don't often take the time to explain our methods, point out or own worst moments or respond to our readers as I've done here. And, ironically, it is THAT effort that has made people who wish to see a personal vendetta here when, in fact, I have a history prior to this of recommending Joe Schoenmann to editors of major newspapers.

* Back to that Sun bias thing. JeffinOKC is close when he says I make 20 percent of my income from the work I do for two Greenspun publications. It's more like 15 percent. Not a small sum. Which tells you something. I've followed through on this coverage despite knowing that it's vaguely possible that someone could get ticked off and I could lose that important revenue stream. But I do it anyway because I believe it's important. At the very least, I have to believe Joe Schoenmann put more effort into balancing his stories and triple checking his facts knowing my readers and I are watching carefully, and that's good news for everyone -- including Joe. But when was the last time you, oh brave nasty anonymous blog poster, did something that could seriously jeopardize your livelihood just because you felt it was the right thing to do? Never, I'm sure.

* Other bloggers. It is true there are other Vegas bloggers who critique the media, but the generally do it from a serious political perspective. That's a valuable service, but it's not the same as media criticism from a respected journalist with a journalism degree and a lifetime of newsroom experience. Debate that all you want; I stand by my record any day. And other prominent media critics around the country have emailed in recent days to let me know that being accused of being an egomaniac is standard fare for the task.

* Speaking of anonymous blog posts: Some have asked privately why I don't limit this blog's posting abilities. I don't want to do that at this time. The debate is generally healthy, except when it veers into truly offensive language such as what I deleted. I hope nobody thought I was limiting debate by deleting that one notice. It just didn't have any point to it. Well, it showed that whoever was badgering my old editor couldn't win on the merits of a real conversation so he/she went off the wall. But still, it was ugly and unnecessary. I may deputize a friend to delete posts that cross that line while I'm unavailable. Will decide later.

On to dinner in Zurich. Then a little Xanax to readjust the old body clock. Photos coming later!

The Strip is LIVE tonight w/ Maya Lin!

I know, I know. Maya Lin's no Bette Midler. But trust me. She's fascinating. Hear the full interview with her and hear her giggle about her first jaunt through a Vegas casino on tonight's show.

Come on down to the live chat at LVROCKS.Com from 7-8 pm PT. Or wait until Thursday and catch the podcast. Your call. We love you either way.

That Big Thing I've Been Hinting At...

The trouble with hyping something is that heightened expectations are so easy to disappoint. And the importance of this story may not be readily apparent to everyone. You might recall earlier this week I beat up on a snooty critic who felt himself clever reciting the hackneyed old view of Vegas as, in his words, "a steroidal temple of tackiness."

Well, in the same pages as that phrase appeared, I'm breaking on Saturday an exclusive in The New York Times about a $40 million public art program at MGM Mirage's CityCenter. You can read all about it here.

Why is this such a big deal?

To start with, the artists involved are the Elvises (Elvi?) of their worlds. None is more amazing than Maya Lin, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial sculptress. She's creating a $3 million, 130-foot cast-silver representation of the Colorado River. Some pieces are being created, others are being acquired. Among the artists is Jenny Holzer, Claes Oldenburg, Frank Stella, Henry Moore, Richard Long and Nancy Rubins.

Don't worry; I wasn't that familiar with all of them either before I caught wind of this story. That's why I grabbed some images of what some of the pieces will look like.

First, here's the Henry Moore piece, which MGM Mirage paid $7 million for:


This here is the Claes Oldenburg piece, called "Typewriter Eraser X"...


The wackiest of the pieces may be the Nancy Rubins piece. She takes boats and stuff and turns them into a gargantuan tree, and this one will be 85-by-65-feet big. The images below show roughly where it'll be and what it looks like, which provides if nothing else a pretty cool new visual perspective on CityCenter. The Times has a slideshow, but these weren't included:


But the big deal here is that this plan has the potential to kick off an arts arms race in Las Vegas that really could turn the town into a destination for cultural tourists. Sure, we've had small Strip museums -- Bellagio and Venetian and, before he realized Rolexes provide better profits, Wynn Las Vegas -- but those are one aspect.

This collection -- along with the impressive architects involved with CityCenter -- singlehandedly changed the view of Las Vegas for art critic Joan Altabe, who I had quoted in a piece in the Times in 2002 railing against putting great art in a city where everything is so fake. How, she wondered, would people even know they were looking at the real thing with all the reproductions of famous cities and frescos around them?

In a comment that got cut from the Times piece because of space constraints, she said: “This is going to put Vegas on the map in a totally different way. Someone with an art mind is working here. I’m dazzled by this. It’s a step away from what I thought was a failing idea.”

You can hear a longer conversation with the wonderful Maya Lin next week on "The Strip Podcast." And I guess that's one other reason I'm so jazzed; every time Vegas goes in a new and unexpected direction, it provides me with an opportunity to learn something new from nothing less than the biggest names in their fields.