The couple has sauntered over to the entrance of the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art, where they are now considering paying a $10 admission to stare at a $78 million painting by Van Gogh. The man looks sceptical. He also, to be honest, looks like he may never have braved the threshold of an art gallery before; he is a cowboy, wearing blue jeans and a black Stetson, pointy-toed leather boots. He seems to be the real thing, too, the kind of Westerner that still ranches and ropes in Montana or Wyoming. The woman is less revealed in her attire; attractive but not sophisticated.
She begins to tell him what she has heard about this place, and her halting dissertation on 20th-century art is suddenly touching and important. The owner of the hotel, which houses the gallery, spent $300 million to buy these pictures. There's the Van Gogh, and also a Renoir, and a Picasso and a Matisse. It's supposed to be really something, she's heard.
It is movingly apparent that this morsel of "culture" is unusual and that this woman is hungry. The couple enter the gallery.
These are among the masses who Steve Wynn had in mind when he decided to reinvent Las Vegas last year. "How," Wynn writes in a 20-page document about his vision, "do you make Las Vegas a successful competitor to London, Rome, or Paris?" His answer was the Bellagio, a $1.6 billion, 3,025-room resort that is unlike anything else in this most unusual of cities. On opening day in October, 80,000 people (about half the population of Co Limerick) walked through the hotel lobby.
Before they even made it there, they first strolled along a quarter-mile-long balustrade that lines a man-made eight-acre lake in front of the Italianate facade. Every 90 minutes, the lake erupts, as water from 1,200 outlets shoots 200 feet in the air in a dazzling pattern. The lobby is canopied by a $10 million Dale Chihuly sculpture vaguely intended to be a bouquet of flowers, with 2,164 pieces of coloured glass. As you make your way through the casino you are lulled by the cheery sounds trilling from a phalanx of 2,700 slot machines: Bells chime an almost heavenly counterpoint to an eternal rain of coins from successive jackpots. All this tinkling is muted by wall-to-wall carpeting and the piped-in arias of Italian tenors.
Off to one side of the casino something else entirely is going on. It is hushed, and there are men in tuxedos trying to look like they are not guarding the doors, which is of course exactly what they are doing. It is a suite of subdued beige and blue rooms. The anticipated customer here is Asian, and very rich. The trouble is the hush is due as much to the Asian economic crisis as the attempt at dignified opulence. The place is nearly empty. You could hear a yen drop. It is the kind of environment in which most of us, surrounded by silk tapestries and Chinese porcelains (oops) would feel inappropriately dressed no matter what we were wearing.
Linger a while, but Steve Wynn wants you to continue on, to see his art gallery. Still, he first wants to sharpen your senses, clear your palate of the street carnival noise that may be lingering in your soul. His sorbet of choice is the conservatory and botanical garden, where you are enveloped in aromas from blooms that are changed every 30 days.
You stroll, a little more slowly now, through an atrium. The intensity of the flowers, like the colossal chandelier in the entry, suggest a kind of sweet, almost indigestible, Italian nougat; and offer some visual competition, though understated, to the neon outside on The Strip. The flower beds are a kind of theatrical event, arranged on hydraulic lifts, a modular stage that can be lowered nightly to a troop of gardeners, who replace beleaguered plants and leave not a leaf or a footprint behind. In the autumn, the conservatory's floral theme was a two-storey cornucopia, the American Thanksgiving Day icon of abundance. This winter, to please the high-roller cultural tastes of an Asian clientele, the floral design was a Chinese New Year's Dragon.
ODDLY, everything in the Bellagio is real, from the marble to the art, to the flowers, to the beluga. The styles of visual pleasuring extend to the restaurants: behind the sushi bar at the stark and modern Shintaro, wall-to-wall tanks of back-lit yellow jellyfish drift like luminous undulating doilies.
Most Las Vegas hotels and casinos - Las Vegas is its hotels and casinos - are fake and proud of it. Illusion and trickery are the currency here, in architecture, in food, in kitschy replication of other tourist destinations around the globe, and especially in a conceit that it is actually possible to beat the odds and win money at the gambling tables.
The old Las Vegas was a veritable monument to tackiness, a home for top-bill lounge lizards, show girls in marabou plumage, and neon both garish and eye- popping. It was the vision of gangsters, Jewish and Italian tough guys from places such as Hoboken, New Jersey who saw a way to make money in the vast desert of Nevada, a land unregulated and unencumbered by law enforcement or good taste.
For the most part, the generation that created that place is gone. But the sons have returned, and are determined to remake this place. This second generation, raised on the bounty of those low-brow ventures, is now well-educated and well-travelled. Steve Wynn was just such a home boy. His father, whose name was Michael Weinberg, ran penny ha'penny bingo parlours on the east coast and died in his 40s in 1963. He left behind a wife, two sons, and thousands of dollars of debts.
Wynn moved to Las Vegas in 1967 and slowly began amassing an empire, buying and selling real estate and casinos. By 1989 he opened the $740 million Mirage Hotel, an opulent venture for its time. (It was also an early indicator of Wynn's showmanship. An artificial volcano on the property erupts every 15 minutes, spilling red-hot lava into the pools below.)
Along the way, Wynn was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative eye disease. And that is part of the irony of this man who has brought a serious and stunning art collection to a place known for its absence of culture; Steve Wynn is going blind. Although he is fit and tanned and handsome at 56, in a few years' time he will be unable to see the works he has collected.
And considerable works they are. Some in the art world sniffed as word spread that Wynn was on a buying spree for major 19th and 20th-century works. What would this nouveau riche man from Las Vegas of all places acquire? There was an expectation that the collection would be clunky at best, a display of the consequence of pure money unhindered by sensibility.
The word was wrong, and almost all now agree that Wynn has put together a small but remarkable collection. The gallery attempts to mimic a museum; coffered ceilings, dark walls, discreet lighting. Although the gallery is in the middle of a hotel, it is somehow separate; Eric Gibson of the Wall Street Journal describes the art as "quarantined".
With New York dealer William Acquavella as his guide, Wynn embarked on a serious hunt for serious works, with the understanding that he would find no bargains. The first of his Van Goghs, Peasant Woman Against a Background of Wheat had been hanging in New York's Metropolitan Museum. It was painted weeks before the artist's suicide in 1890 at Auvers-sur-Oise, an artists' colony where the painter had gone to try to relieve his depression. Shortly after painting this serene woman in a field, Van Gogh returned to that field and shot himself. Wynn felt it was a work he had to have. He paid $47.5 million of his own money to acquire it.
The 26 other paintings in the gallery include a remarkable work by Picasso of his mistress Dora Maar. Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the gallery is it accessibility. A folksy heartfelt narrative by Wynn is offered with headphones. He talks about the painters' lives, and how he felt when he first saw some of the works, a technique that cannot fail to provoke the curiosity of even the most indifferent of gallery-goers to know more and to look more closely.
Outside the hotel, away from Chanel and Armani boutiques, away from the hotel guests wearing Rolex watches, on the corner of Flamingo and Las Vegas Boulevards, the near-hypnotic din of cultured gambling is replaced by the roar of cars and crowds of overstuffed Americans clutching cameras and children.
There's an unmistakable whiff of sewage in the air on the Strip. Insiders speak conspiratorially about the limits of an infrastructure already overtaxed by the hordes of visitors who fill up each new hotel as soon as it's constructed.
Moreover, last year's vision is today's tired re-run. The Bellagio brought in 5 per cent more visitors to Vegas in the month it opened, but after that, tourist passion cooled. Room rates were dramatically lowered. And then came the Asian economic crisis. Wall Street analysts say that revenues from baccarat, the high end game favoured by high-rolling Asian customers, could be down 5 to 15 per cent in the first quarter.
Wall Street also worries that Las Vegas may sink under the glut of these mega-resorts. Wynn is about to have plenty of competition. In April the 3,000-suite Venetian will open, and this thing makes the Bellagio look cosy.
Developer Sheldon Adelson and his wife spent their honeymoon in Venice, Italy. So when he made about $900 million in the computer business, he decided to recreate Venice in Vegas by building a $1.5 billion hotel. (Doesn't everybody celebrate anniversaries this way?) No Van Goghs here, just life-size replicas of the Doges Palace and the Rialto Bridge. Statues on building columns will be so intricately carved you will be able to distinguish fingernails on the figures.
Canals will snake through the property, and gondolas will transport visitors from one end to the other. Some 78 stores, 15 restaurants . . . all under one room. Exhibiting the kind of boundless optimism or insanity that allows men to execute such visions, Adelson says, "There's two types of properties in Las Vegas. There's the Venetian and there's everybody else."
Everybody else includes the Mandalay Bay opening in March, the Resort at Summerlin in April, and the Paris-Vegas in September. (Its construction site already looms over the Strip thanks to a replication of the Eiffel Tower.)
It may be all too much. The total of 20,000 new hotel rooms since October has created a crisis, and casino stocks are in a slump. But there are still plenty of jobs and any coming meltdown hasn't yet been felt on the ground.
On the way out of town to the airport, the taxi driver gets personal. He has lived in many cities, bounced from one coast to the next. His father was a university professor, but he likes living here, driving a cab. When the boom stops, he says, he'll pack his bags.
The terminal for Southwest Airlines has commuter flights out of Las Vegas to cities on the west coast every half hour. As you wait at the gate there's still one last opportunity to play the slot machines. It's hardly Steve Wynn's vision, but at the end of the day it is the real reason why anyone would come to this gaudy mirage in the first place. Despite the gallery and the food and decadence, Las Vegas remains a place to hear one last heavenly jangle of promise before boarding the flight back to your life.