Never mind that I know this writer, assigned him work when I was an editor and am mentioned by name on this book's acknowledgements page: Boss says not to worry, so I ain't worrying.
That's altogether fitting, really, since everywhere William L. Fox looks in Las Vegas—seeking art, nature, dance and sex—he finds blurred distinctions, fudged relationships, traded places and conflicted interests. Everyone's doing it and no one's worried, least of all the boss:
"So Wynn buys the art and is exempt from the tax for owning it. He leases it to the hotel, which earns more than enough from admissions to pay for the operating costs of the gallery. When he sells the art, he's exempt from most of the sales tax ..."
Follow that? Wynn, a rich entrepreneur, takes over a function traditionally assigned to nonprofit organizations (collecting and displaying art), rents the treasures to his own hotel and muscles the state into making the whole deal worth his while, tax-wise. Business, nonprofit and government get all mixed up and Wynn comes out looking like a genius.
Vegas is a fast-forward experiment in such collapsing boundaries, and Fox takes pretty good advantage of that fact in the slim, readable and very thoughtful In the Desert of Desire: Las Vegas and the Culture of Spectacle, his probe into "the presentation of art, animals and sex in American society, as seen through that very peculiar filter, the Las Vegas Strip."
In this book, as in his other volumes of "cultural geography," Fox practices what he calls "narrative scholarship," the simple strategy of embedding the thinky bits into a travel story. So he's always dragging a friend somewhere and pondering it: Primm or Bellagio, the Shark Reef or the Secret Garden, an adult cabaret or a so-called museum. At Bellagio, he'll be reminded of the underlying similarities between that ritzy hotel and the just-as-ritzy J. Paul Getty Museum ("Although the Bellagio was envisioned to stimulate visceral excitement, and the Getty to encourage contemplation, the public saw both as accessible spectacles exemplifying wealth, which is to say reality writ large via artifice"). At the Secret Garden, his girlfriend will see a brown mouse, "the only genuine wildlife here." At the Las Vegas Art Museum, he'll finger our tax code and libertarian streak as the perps behind our lack of a true museum or anything else not given us by casinos ("the theory and practice is that ... tourists should and do pay for almost every key infrastructure in the state ... an abject refusal by Nevadans to take personal responsibility for their own well-being"). At Zumanity, he gets an up-close eyeful of the show's chubby temptress before deciding that the show's eroticism should be more "experimental" and "surreal"—simulated sex acts set to music are, well, so-so.
All of this is by way of wondering what happens when you spectacle-ize things that aren't—or haven't been, until Vegas got its hands on them—spectacles. If the answers seem apparent (art becomes a line item in a casino's business plan; nature gets faked in ways not necessarily good for the animals or instructive to the viewers; sex is commodified), Fox's way of arriving at them is entertaining, full of capsule histories about zoo practices and ballet, the disparate dots firmly connected. And always he wants to know: What's being sold?
Elsewhere in the nation, Fox notes, the strong distinction between for-profit and nonprofit enterprises is "a barrier that people ... hold tantamount to the separation of church and state." Here, those differences are swamped without a second thought. Casinos are our museums and zoos, because only they have enough money to do those things with the big production values we've come to demand.
The effect flows the other way, too, outward from here. Take the Guggenheim-Hermitage Museum in the Venetian. Its parent organization, the stately Guggenheim Foundation, has been mired in turmoil over the blatantly commercial path it's been following (as typified by the opening of the Vegas outpost). Under the leadership of Thomas Krens, a pure Vegas-style impresario, it adopted a blockbuster mentality—mounting popular shows about motorcycles and fashion—in place of the museum's more traditional role of offering art as a public service. In other words, it's been Vegas-ized. Zoos, too: "Zoos are now breeding what they know to be genetically inferior species, such as Cincinnati with its white tigers ..."
Vegas is the world, baby, and what's being sold—here, there and everywhere—is a simulation of experience, a consensual artifice and a whole lot of tickets. No wonder Fox loves this town.