Art: I, Guggenheim, take you, State Hermitage, to show art in Vegas

Two of the world's most famous art museums have tied the knot in an unlikely alliance. The result will find some of fine art's best work displayed in what is regarded as the world's most tacky destination - the city of sin, Las Vegas.


Those who tie the knot in Las Vegas rarely bother with newspaper announcements. But sometimes they should not be allowed to get away with it. Here - with no charge to them - is news of the most unlikely pairing in the city of sin for many a year. Congratulations to the Guggenheim and the Hermitage.

Murmurs of disapproval follow every Vegas wedding and these happy lovers are doubtless prepared for them. On this occasion, though, it will not be aunts and great-uncles who will be harrumphing but rather the world's assembled art snobs.

Two of the world's most prestigious art institutions, the Solomon R Guggenheim Foundation of New York and the State Hermitage Museum of St Petersburg, have reached a conclusion that, until even a few years ago, would have seemed insane.

Las Vegas, better known as a desert shrine to all that is base and gaudy, neon and greedy, is actually an ideal place to show fine art.

And so it is that they have exchanged rings on the edge of the Strip and unveiled plans for a new collaborative gallery to be called the Hermitage Guggenheim Museum or the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum - the prenuptial negotiations became a little stuck on the naming issue.

Will they, at least, be locating their museum at a decent distance from the frazzling cacophony that is the rest of Vegas? There must be a mountain bluff somewhere that could afford a little altitude above the thronging trippers and the incessant gonging of the slot machines. Sorry, no. They decided that if they are going to do Las Vegas, they are really going to do it.

The chosen venue is the Venetian, a new hotel bang on the Strip with a casino, of course, and more than 3000 expensive rooms. It is also one of the most recent manifestations of Las Vegas as less sin-city and more fantasy theme park.

Visit the Venetian and you will never need fly to the real Venice again. It has its own San Marco tower and a full-sized replica of the Rialto Bridge.

Indeed, in Las Vegas you can fantasise yourself into different lands and time zones every hour. Wander south from the Venetian and Paris, another new hotel, awaits, with an ersatz Eiffel Tower rising through the ceiling of the gambling hall and into the dry Nevada sky. Or take in a pirate-ship battle, complete with a watery sinking, outside the Treasure Island, an erupting volcano at the Mirage, or a re-creation, in steel and black glass, of an Egyptian great pyramid that is the Luxor.

The Guggenheim Hermitage, due to open next spring, is to be in the main lobby of the Venetian and will be perilously close to its gambling floor. Designed by the acclaimed architect Rem Koolhaas, it will be a jewel-box affair, very small - just 711 sq m - with a collection of about 40 works, half from the Guggenheim and half from the Hermitage, that will rotate twice-yearly. Included in the opening show will be master works by Kandinsky, Matisse, Modigliani, Monet and Renoir.

The Guggenheim, meanwhile, is taking its Las Vegas love affair even further. It has commissioned Koolhaas, whose edifices include the Kunsthal in Rotterdam, to build another, much larger, space that will house the Guggenheim Las Vegas. Hangar-like in scale, with a soaring 21m ceiling, it will sit between the Venetian's casino and its multi-storey car park.

To be the fifth member of the Guggenheim family worldwide, the Guggenheim Las Vegas will essentially be a giant exhibition space, again with rotating shows of works drawn from the institution's giant collection.

It will open with a return of the Guggenheim's highly successful The Art of the Motorcycle, which showed in New York in 1998. There is no word yet on any commercial sponsorship by the gleaming Harley-Davidson cafe that sits just two blocks away.

Fine art has been imported to Las Vegas before. The pioneer was Steve Wynn, the founder of the Mirage and longtime emperor of the Vegas hotel industry.

When he opened his extravagant Bellagio hotel in 1998, he installed $300 million of his own masterpieces. When Wynn put up a giant marquee outside the Bellagio which declared: "Now Appearing: Monet and Van Gogh," the serious art world shuddered, as it did when he hung priceless Picassos over the tables in one of the hotel's restaurants.

Wynn's instincts proved sound. The transformation of Vegas from tack-central to a place with at least some fragments of class and sophistication was indeed enough to draw the crowds away, for a second, from the slots, the tables and the rollercoasters to the contemplation of rare art.

Wynn, understandably, is now taking a bow. "I'm delighted to be a catalyst," he said, commenting on the Guggenheim and Hermitage projects. "This a fundamental change," he said, speaking of the newly cosmopolitan character of Las Vegas.

Even so, the director of the Guggenheim Foundation, Thomas Krens, is barely over the shock of what he is undertaking. "I could scarcely have imagined working with Las Vegas as a site even one year ago. I thought it was too tacky."

He began to change his mind last year when he paid his first visit to the city and watched as the paying punters queued to see the paintings at the Bellagio gallery.

The underlying philosophy is the democratisation of art-viewing. Nearly 37 million tourists travelled to Vegas last year. If you can get a fraction of those to gape at your trove of artworks, you have scored.

"Las Vegas is America," said Dr Mikhail Piotrovsky, director of the venerable, but cash-starved, Hermitage.

"It is where a lot of people go. 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."

One question still lingers. Vegas has become a world of the fake and the faux, as the Venetian demonstrates most brilliantly. After visiting either of the two new art museums now rising within its bounds, tourists might make their way to the third floor and rest their feet awhile by taking an $18 ride aboard a pretend gondola bobbing along a fictitious Venice canal.

The water is wet, the gondolier sings real opera. Reach up as you pass under the footbridges and you will feel real brick. But the third floor is not really Venice. And the Eiffel Tower is not really the Eiffel Tower. So why are the Hermitage and the Guggenheim even bothering?

Build the galleries, by all means, and hang the pictures. But why make them real? Reproductions, if they are good enough, would surely do just fine.

- INDEPENDENT