Las Vegas: America’s surprising new art destination

Walking from the heat of the Strip into the cool, coin-clamorous lobby of the Palms Casino Resort, you pass by an Old Vegas legend. Hung quietly in the right-hand corner, gently lit amid a lobby of bright lights, is Andy Warhol’s Double Elvis.

It’s one of the most recognisable pieces in Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta’s huge art collection, yet most of the visitors to their newly-renovated hotel miss it. How can it compete with the likes of Damian Hirst’s huge tripartite shark tank, The Unknown (Explored, Explained, Exploded), suspended over the central bar? Or the check-in desk, where a sprawling 60ft wall wrap of saturated blue sky and neon pink pithiness states “Wish You Were Here”. Both effortlessly steal the limelight from the silvery, subtle Elvis and you can’t help but think that they’re meant to.

After all, this is the new Palms – reopened after a $620m renovation – and it’s leading the march into New Vegas: a digital age destination for art. The gambling is still going, but there’s a whole other world on the walls of this city, both inside and out.

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Las Vegas might not be the first place you think of when it comes to art tourism, but it’s quickly rising up the US ranks. While art festivals, murals and local initiatives have revolutionised the Downtown area, hotels like The Palms and Park MGM are busy painting the Strip in every colour you can imagine.

The Palms certainly feels like a gallery first and a hotel second. Wandering its halls feels like one big treasure hunt. If you can tear your eyes from the flash and thrill of the gambling floor, you’ll find a blue-chip trove of Banksy, Basquiat, Murakami, Hirst and Warhol. Thanks to the background and influence of Creative Director Tal Cooperman, there’s a refreshing emphasis on street and contemporary art, which has taken over the hotel’s bars, restaurants and club rooms.

Though the Fertitta’s have enough art to grace these walls for decades, they’ve commissioned multiple new murals, paintings and even entire suites for the renovation. Nothing has been overlooked. Behind the glass at the cashiers desk sits a frantic scramble of red and white faces from the highly sought-after American artist Timothy Curtis. The chapel – a typically tawdry Vegas staple – has been pared down to a black and white cartoon courtesy of designer Joshua Vides.

Sculptor Scott Hove has achieved the remarkable and turned a single toilet cubicle into a cake-inspired installation. It’s the only time and place where toilet selfies are absolutely acceptable. Even a little-used stairwell in the rear of restaurant Vetri Cucina has had the art treatment, with Australian husband-and-wife team DABSMYLA transforming a flight of stairs into one of rainbow fancy.

It’s clear that Las Vegas’s reputation as a city of excess holds true in its art scene. This reputation is captured perfectly by Olivia Steele, whose two works on show at The Palms include the collaborative Wish You Were Here welcome desk and her apt Camden Cocktail Lounge installation All I Ever Wanted Was Everything. Though light-artist Steele only came to the city thanks to the Palms commission, her wry neon writing seems made for Vegas, blending satire, spectacle and sophistication all in Sin City’s favourite medium.

“Vegas is one of the neon capitals of the world,” says Steele. “Bringing it into a different context where it’s not signage and it’s handwritten – it’s not super-loud, it’s more sophisticated – is a very refreshing visual.”

Tennessee-born Steele was commissioned while the hotel was still under construction and had “no clue what [she] was getting into”. Now she can grasp the scope and scale of what the Fertitta brothers’ are trying to achieve in Vegas.

“It’s so direly needed to have a cultural hub there for contemporary art because it’s missing… They have paved the way; definitely broken the mould. What a concept to turn that hotel into a contemporary art experience. I think that the collection is so much better than half the museums I’ve ever gone to.”

Walking around The Palms, it’s hard to argue otherwise. You can easily spend an entire day inside – or four as I did – and not lose a single cent at the roulette table. It is also by no means the only hotel luring art lovers to Las Vegas.

Park MGM opened in late 2018 with an extraordinary collection of artwork on their walls. Like The Palms, Park MGM put art at the heart of its rebuild, focusing on emerging and contemporary artists to match its own new beginning.

Its lobby is understated enough to believe you’re not in Vegas. Soothing sage walls and creamy marble flooring could almost lull you into another city, if the roots of a monstrous tree weren’t growing out the ceiling. The Brazilian artist responsible, Henrique Oliviera, packs Park MGM’s first punch with a sculpture so well-placed that it’s tempting to go looking for the rest of the redwood upstairs.

Like so much of Vegas, it’s weird but it works. Oliviera’s idea was to “ground the property; give it roots” and this idea set the natural theme for Park MGM’s subsequent commissions.

Works here include ethereal pastoral murals from Claire Basler, iPad landscape triptychs from David Hockney, a calming video collaboration from Iranian duo Shoja Azari and Shahram Karimi and three paintings from Israeli artist Guy Yanai.

Yanai was one of the many artists given a clear idea of what Park MGM wanted; to bring a natural side to Las Vegas visitors. “They challenged me in that they wanted a woman among vegetation” Yanai explained. “But I normally do not paint figures.” Despite this challenge, Yanai delivered in spectacular fashion.

For me, his bold abstracted paintings of fashionable figures and foliage are the most memorable in the collection and they form an important bridge between the modern city and plant-filled Park MGM. It’s impressive given Yanai has yet to even see the city, but he knows its potential as an art destination: “It just takes a few people with some will and vision.”

Park MGM evidently has both in abundance. The star of the show at their Mama Rabbit bar isn’t the ever-flowing mezcal but the fantastical mural from Okuda; On the Record karaoke bar is similarly outshone by its massive al fresco artwork of Queen, courtesy of street art legend Shepard Fairey. Okuda and Fairey are two of the artists straddling the very different sides of Las Vegas. They have works in the grittier, local Downtown area as well as in the bright, sanitised lights of the casinos.

Whether you come to Vegas for art or partying, you can’t miss Downtown. After a period of desperately-needed rejuvenation, the Downtown area of Vegas – actually north of the main Strip – is attracting artists, musicians and tourists alike. Once an area many visitors and even locals feared to tread, it’s now a taste of real Vegas life and a break from the pageantry and pizzazz of the Strip.

Its annual Life is Beautiful festival is entering its eighth year, which brings international artists and musicians Downtown to daub its buildings and brighten the side streets and squares. Many of these works disappear after a year, as new festival pieces are painted over them. Though its tough to lose remarkable artworks, it’s a refreshingly realistic approach to street art that’s world’s away from the plastic-fronted Banksy in The Palms’ Greene’s Kitchen restaurant. You can’t help but feel there’s a lot more life and vibrancy to Downtown’s impermanent pieces.

While traditional galleries are still thin on the ground, Downtown is seeing a growing number of “art spaces”, such as newcomers Ferguson’s Downtown and AREA15. Despite what their statement piece suggests – a truck sculpture straight from Burning Man – Ferguson’s offers a quiet space for artists, small business and musicians. AREA15 will up the ante as a giant “art and retail complex” with interactive exhibits, conference spaces and art-themed restaurants. Though the Las Vegas flagship has yet to open, the team behind AREA15 are already looking to open a similar space in the north of the UK.

Already up and running is the fantastic Neon Museum, an open air gallery with a junk-yard vibe. All the familiar Old Vegas signs end up here, in a faded mishmash of former glory, while visiting artists such as Tim Burton add their creations into the mix. It’s small but special and a Downtown must-do.

The final stop to make is back on the Strip, this time in The Cosmopolitan. Another hotel that’s putting art at the forefront, The Cosmopolitan has a far more relaxed approach than its peers. “Nothing at the Cosmopolitan is behind a velvet rope,” states the hotel’s senior marketing manager, Emily Labéjof. “We want people to interact with it.”

Labéjof truly means it. Roark Gourley’s gigantic shoes are the hotel’s biggest social media spots, with visitors actually clambering into the shoes to take snapshots. Upstairs, Mark Chatterley’s ceramic dog sculptures have to be replaced every so often due to wear and tear from good-natured petters.

Our art tour began in Starbucks of all places, where 72-year-old French artist Georges Rousse has created his only permanent exhibit – a forced perspective piece that skips across the ceiling and walls in seemingly random colourful shapes until you stand in just the right spot.

While The Palms and Park MGM have created incredible gallery spaces, The Cosmopolitan has curated something different, down-to-earth and entirely fun. Las Vegas native Mallory Dawn created an innovative recycled installation from resin, wires and 3000 plastic Cosmopolitan key cards due for replacement. A collaboration between six artists produced the comical Do Not Disturb | Please Enter hotel door hanger collection. The Cosmopolitan isn’t afraid to put either itself or its guests in its art.

The jewel in its crown however isn’t part of its collection. The Art-O-Mat vending machines, converted from old cigarette dispensers, are dotted around the hotel’s upper floors and for just $5 you can take home a surprise piece of art no bigger than a matchbox. In my opinion, it’s the only way to end an art trip in Vegas.

After the glut and glitz of four-storey murals, $100,000-a-night art suites, endless gallery greats and colourful newcomers, it’s delightful to hold a small piece of the city’s art scene in your hand. It’s a small memento of the massive change taking place in Sin City.

What’s happening in Vegas is an art renaissance – but thanks to The Cosmopolitan, it doesn’t have to stay there.