Because more people go shopping in the resorts than gamble there, make sure that customers coming in off the street have to wend their way through at least a corner of the gaming arena before taking the escalator up to the shops arrayed along the Grand Canal. If that means having to buttress and waterproof the second-story floor to hold a half million gallons (roughly two thousand tons) of water, the income generated will more than pay for the extra cost. What’s interesting is that the two Guggenheim Museum gallery spaces were placed on the gaming floor, adjacent not to the retail entrances but to tables where people play games, thus putting art into the context of recreation rather than consumption, a not illogical choice.
The decor of the Venetian’s lobby, located off a side-street entrance, is tastefully dressed down in black, cream, and various shades of brown — so the red poster advertising the Guggenheim gallery is a profoundly jarring note. At the top it quotes the Washington Post: “Sensationally sensual . . . showy, sexy, dynamic, dreamy,” and at the bottom the Los Angeles Times: “Where entertainment is art, now art is entertainment.”
Beckmann gets us both in as locals, thus obtaining a $3 discount from the general admission price of $15, and a woman punches our tickets at the automatic glass doors that, once they close behind us, eliminate completely the clamor of the slot machines. The smaller gallery has been renamed the Guggenheim-Hermitage Museum, a purely rhetorical ploy for public relations. It’s a gallery, not a museum, as the original press release from Krens noted: the facility doesn’t collect or curate art but was designed simply to exhibit it. But the public reacts more favorably to the notion of a museum than a gallery. The latter is taken to mean a place that both shows and sells art, as with Wynn’s original Bellagio Gallery, and the Guggenheim is trying to distinguish itself from the commercial nature of Wynn’s operation. The recent reversal of names from Hermitage Guggenheim to Guggenheim-Hermitage has a more obscure rationale, stemming from the economic reality of who is now paying more money to rent the space from the hotel.
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