Hotel art is famously bad—a strategy, it’s rumored, to discourage sticky-fingered guests from swiping canvases off walls. But in Las Vegas, a wealth of world-class artwork exists in the public areas of hotels and casinos. Next time you’re in Sin City, take a break from the slot machine and hit the Strip. A (free!) dose of culture is just a lobby away.
Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas
For its Wallworks installation, the Cosmopolitan commissioned four artists to decorate the resort’s indoor, multilevel parking garage with murals and graffiti. Shepard Fairey, RETNA, Kenny Scharf, and Shinique Smith each created a site-specific “wallwork” using materials ranging from spray paint to wheat paste. The murals express cultural and sociopolitical concepts, as seen in graphic artist Fairey’s piece, which uses bold patterns to convey the visual language of political propaganda, touching on themes of power and rebellion. The murals vary greatly in color, style, and subject, but when taken together, they transform an otherwise-mundane space into a concrete jungle of ideas.
This roundup appears in Issue 33 of Alta Journal.
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Bellagio Resort & Casino
Inside the lobby of the legendary Bellagio hangs a world record: the largest glass sculpture, measuring almost 2,000 square feet in area and weighing 50,000 pounds (including its steel armature). Dale Chihuly’s Fiori di Como (meaning “flowers of Como,” a reference to the Italian province that is home to the town of Bellagio) is a behemoth ceiling installation made of thousands of pieces of handblown glass. Bursting in vibrant hues of blue, green, yellow, and red, the work resembles the brimming contents of a petri dish seen through a microscope. A permanent fixture of the Bellagio since its 1998 opening, Fiori di Como is a true portrait of Las Vegas: overwhelming, elusive, and beautiful in its own curious way.
Palms Casino Resort
Even though Vegas is landlocked, there are sharks (and we’re not talking about cards). Inside the Palms’ Unknown Bar is a trisected creature suspended in formaldehyde inside a trio of glass boxes. The 13-foot-long tiger shark is part of Damien Hirst’s Natural History series, a project started in the 1990s in which Hirst selected sharks, calves, and doves to be dissected, preserved, and encased in bulletproof vitrines as an exploration of mortality and the physical world. This macabre piece—The Unknown (Explored, Explained, Exploded)—is offset by cheerful Hirst paintings of polka dots, also hanging in the bar. The contrast between the works doesn’t really make sense. But the animal, frozen in perpetuity, poses the question: “Does anything?”
Aria Resort & Casino
How does a hotel signal luxury to pleasure-seeking tourists? An enormous Maya Lin sculpture could do the trick. Completed in 2009 and suspended above the Aria’s registration desk, Silver River is a re-creation of the Colorado River, made entirely from reclaimed silver. The 84-foot-long installation evokes both a lightning bolt and a wisp of smoke, an homage to the vitality of water. Weighing in at 3,700 pounds, Silver River proves Lin’s mastery of the delicate balance between art and architecture.
Fontainebleau Las Vegas
In the south lobby of the Fontainebleau, a monolithic 46-foot-tall Urs Fischer sculpture depicts two forms meeting. The Lovers #3, an abstract embrace made from gold leaf, stainless steel, and aluminum, appears to change shape as the viewer circles it, echoing the mercurial nature of love. Flanking the sculpture are two murals also by Fischer: The Touch and The Eye, bizarre paintings of formal headshots overlaid with surrealist imagery and coarse brushstrokes. One image: a blond woman’s face obscured by an enormous hard-boiled egg. Perhaps a love story of its own.•
India Brown is from New York City and is a junior at the University of Southern California, where she studies journalism.
