Looking for a place to marry high art and popular culture, where a tourist in Bermuda shorts can wander into an art gallery fit for kings?
Try Las Vegas, the desert oasis that has gone from cowtown to Sin City and is now being transformed into what its boosters call an "entertainment destination" where besides gambling, this year's 36.7 million visitors can stroll down a faux French boulevard or take a gondola ride on an ersatz Venetian canal under an imitation Rialto Bridge.
Joining the Bellagio Hotel's Gallery of Fine Art, which has been packing them in since 1998, a new view of European culture will be unveiled sometime next spring when the State Hermitage Museum, created by the czars in St. Petersburg, will join forces with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of New York and open a mini-museum in the lobby of the Venetian Hotel, one floor below the Rialto Bridge.
"It is an important step forward in the evolution of the city," said Robert Goldstein, president of the 3,036-room Venetian Hotel, which also has a shopping mall, a casino, a convention center and restaurants, which together bring more than a hundred thousand visitors through its lobby daily. "It will be a monumental attraction," Goldstein said. "If it isn't, then something is wrong."
The small, 7,660-square-foot museum will be designed by the Pritzker-prize-winning architect Rem Koolhaas and built by the Venetian Hotel. The Guggenheim and the Hermitage will rent the space to show about 20 paintings from each of their collections in an exhibit that will change on average twice a year. The Guggenheim will also rent a separate 63,700-square-foot exhibition hall at the Venetian, also designed by Koolhaas, which will house special exhibits.
This partnership is not just a merger of cultures, high and low. It also marks the launching of a collaboration between the Guggenheim and the Hermitage first announced last June.
For Dr. Mikhail B. Piotrovsky, director of the venerable Hermitage, the experience in Las Vegas will not be as novel as it seems.
"Las Vegas is America; it is a place where a lot of people go," Piotrovsky said in an telephone interview. "We are accustomed in Russia to bringing art and culture where the people are. It is part of a normal tradition, a kind of Soviet tradition to educate the masses."
Thomas Krens, the director of the Guggenheim, had initially rejected Goldstein's proposal.
"I thought it was too tacky," said Krens, who has helped make the Guggenheim a global museum with branches in Berlin, Venice and Bilbao, Spain. But he was won over by a visit to the art gallery that opened in 1998 in the Bellagio hotel, with impressionist and modern works owned by the Mirage Resorts chairman, Steve Wynn.
"I was impressed," Krens recalled. "First there were lines, but secondly, he had imbedded in the price of the ticket an audio tour. You walked into the gallery, and there was total silence. Everyone was on the audio machines, listening to Steve Wynn's tour, which was intelligent and accessible. And I thought to myself, 'What is wrong with this picture, except my own attitude?' "
Krens likes to compare his Las Vegas venture with his decision to open a stunning museum Bilbao, Spain, which was designed by the California architect Frank Gehry. "I first thought that Bilbao was a highly unlikely place, but the more unlikely the place, the more interesting the opportunities, " Krens said.
Bringing the Hermitage in on the arrangement was Krens' idea, part of his goal to rescue it from poverty at a time of shrinking government support and elusive private sponsorships.