In The Desert Of Desire: Las Vegas And The Culture Of Spectacle
Editorial Reviews
Book Description
The presentation of art, animals, and sex in Las Vegas, and how the creation of spectacle blurs the line between art and business. Las Vegas, says William Fox, is a pay-as-you-play paradise that succeeds through its collective ability to fantasize our deepest desires, which in a consumer society mean vast wealth and the excesses of pleasure and consumption that go with it. In this context, Fox examines how Las Vegas’s culture of spectacle has obscured the boundaries between high art and entertainment extravaganza, nature and fantasy, for-profit and nonprofit enterprises.
His purview ranges from casino art galleries--including Steve Wynn’s private collection and a branch of the famed Guggenheim Museum, --to the dismally underfunded Las Vegas Art Museum; from spectacular casino animal collections like those of magicians Siegfried and Roy and Mandalay Bay’s Shark Reef exhibit to the city’s desultory efforts to create a viable public zoo; from the environmental and psychological impact of lavish water displays in the arid desert to the artistic ambiguities intrinsic to Las Vegas’s floating world of showgirls, lapdancers, and ballet divas.
That Las Vegas represents one of the world’s most opulent displays of private material wealth in all its forms, while at the same time providing miserly funding for local public amenities like museums and zoos, is no accident, Fox maintains. Nor is it unintentional that the city’s most important collections of art and exotic fauna are presented in the context of casino entertainment, part of the feast of sensation and excitement that seduces millions of visitors each year. Instead, this phenomenon shows how our insatiable modern appetite for extravagance and spectacle has diminished the power of unembellished nature and the arts to teach and inspire us, and demonstrates the way our society privileges private benefit over public good. Given that Las Vegas has been shown over and over to be the harbinger of national cultural trends, Fox’s commentary may offer prescient insight into the future of the arts in America, as well as new understanding of the role that public institutions like museums and zoos play in our lives.
About the Author
William L. Fox has written widely on the nature of deserts and the role of the arts in American culture. He is the author of Playa Works: The Myth of the Empty, Mapping the Empty: Eight Artists and Nevada, and The Void, the Grid, and the Sign: Traversing the Great Basin (all available from the University of Nevada Press). He lives in Burbank, California.
In The Desert Of Desire: Las Vegas And The Culture Of Spectacle,William L. Fox,University of Nevada Press,0874175631,Art & Art Instruction,Art museums,Arts,General,Las Vegas,Nevada,Pop Arts / Pop Culture,Popular Culture - General,Popular culture,Social Science,Sociology,Sociology - Urban
In The Desert Of Desire: Las Vegas And The Culture Of Spectacle
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