Travel Log: Art and Money in Las Vegas (US West part 1)

Spring art at the Bellagio. Photo by Guy Podjarny

What surprised me the most about Las Vegas was the abundance of art. I had all kinds of images of Las Vegas in my head: scantily clad young women, casinos, neon signs, shows. But I never thought of Las Vegas as an arty city.

On our city tour, our guide took us to see the ARIA resort and casino lobby. Behind the reception desk is a long, winding piece of metal. It is, in fact, an artwork titled Silver River, commissioned by the developer of the ARIA resort, MGM. This 25-meters piece, made of reclaimed silver (Nevada is the “silver state”) and reflecting the warm yellow light of the casino (designed to promote longer hours of gambling) was part of a project to promote Las Vegas as an art destination. The artist, Maya Lin, noted that the work is “pointedly focusing on an environmental issue”—the drying up of the Colorado River.

It is a magnificent piece with a profound meaning, a real work of art. Finding it hanging in the lobby of a gambling resort was jarring. The environmental message seemed at odds with the extravagance of the casino industry. This contradiction opened up a new way for me to look at the city.

There’s a lot of money in Las Vegas. Casinos, mafia, what have you. It’s in the city’s bones: you can’t build a new five thousand rooms hotel and casino without having some initial capital. And the intimate connection that art always had with money—particularly “dirty” money—has not been invented in Las Vegas. For centuries, the wealthy and powerful used art to move and store value. In Renaissance Italy, bankers commissioned religious art as a “get out of hell free card”.

There’s a vast chasm between the idea of art as the pure expression of human creativity, even as a means to level societal critique and the commission of artwork by casinos. On the one hand, it is amazing that these establishments invest money in art. First, it supports the artists and the art scene. When The Bellagio commissions themed gardens five times a year, hundreds of artists, from designers to florists, can make a living, if not a name for themselves, from these commissions. Second, it makes art available to a much wider audience than museum-goers. The curious casino attendees might walk up to the plaque to discover the meaning of the piece of metal hanging behind the reception desk.

Art is revered in some parts of society. Museums are designed like temples, and I’ve talked before about how we see artists as “pure”, free from society’s influence, and how that isn’t an accurate perception. I’ve been struggling with this tension between art and commercialisation for years. When I write a story, I pour my heart and soul into it. I expect other artists do the same, even when they have other motives. Of course we have other motives, we are human beings.

It connects, for me, to the betrayal I felt when I found out that Chuck Palahniuk knew Gerald Howard, an editor at W. W. Norton who later bought Fight Club and published it. I had bought into the Myth of Chuck Palahniuk as an outsider and of Fight Club as the touchstone “outsider” novel. I wanted Chuck to be a little like Tyler, a rebel and anarchist. But had he been completely outside of the social milieu like Tyler, he wouldn’t have been able to find a publisher. And, of course, Palahniuk wrote the book to try and sell it despite its critique of capitalism. That’s what writers do.

During our Las Vegas visit, we also went to two other places: The Pinball Hall of Fame and Area 15. The Pinball Hall of Fame is just a hangar full of old pinball machines. There are working machines from the 1950s, and we all had a blast there. Area 15 is a collaborative immersive art experience created by a bunch of local artists, with a definite consumerism critique (one of the products on sale at the Omega Mart is a can of Dehydrated Water: just add water). I have little doubt that the buzzing art scene maintained and funded by the casinos gave rise to these kinds of random installations, even if it’s just by attracting art-minded people into the city.

Returning home to reflect and research, I’ve come to a more nuanced view of the tension between art and capital. The silver river flowing behind the ARIA reception desk is both a profound artistic statement about environmental concerns and a luxury decoration purchased by a casino corporation. These contradictions don't cancel each other out—they coexist in the same space.

Perhaps what matters most isn't whether art is "pure" or "commercial," but whether it still has the power to move us, to make us think, to spark conversation. The Maya Lin piece accomplished that for me despite—or perhaps because of—its unexpected setting. It made me question my assumptions about Las Vegas, about art, about the systems that bring creative works into the world.

Ultimately, the messy reality of how art comes to be doesn't diminish its impact. Palahniuk's Fight Club still resonated deeply with me regardless of how it found its publisher. That connection was real. Lin's Silver River still speaks to environmental concerns even as it hangs in a casino. Las Vegas, with all its contradictions, reminds us that art doesn't exist in some pristine realm separate from commerce and power—it's embedded in the same complex human systems we all navigate daily. My surprise at finding profound art in a casino exposed to me my black-and-white preconceptions and refined my view of this tension.