Why High Art Didn’t Make It On The Vegas Strip

When the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum and the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art opened on the Strip, both set out to feed art to the masses. Neither was enough to justify a stop in Las Vegas for the savvy cultural tourist. But that was never the plan. The plan was to insert art where art hadn’t been, make a lot of money doing so and add cachet to the resorts.”

Architecture Not Meant To Last

“Architecture has entered another of its periodic bouts of fascination with impermanence. Maybe it’s the anxiety produced by doomsday predictions about the state of the environment and, lately, the economy. Maybe it’s the quicksilver quality of digital culture, closer in character to sand or water than bricks and mortar. Whatever the source, architects are playing up the idea of temporariness, and even finding solace in it, to a degree not seen since the 1960s and ’70s.”

The Broadway Hollywood Connection

“Broadway would have to shutter many of its houses if it couldn’t turn to the movies for a steady supply of material. The practice has been around for decades, albeit at relatively modest levels. What was once a Hollywood-to-Broadway trickle became a torrent as the millennium approached. Two distinct events marked the change.”

What’s Neuroscience Got To Do With Art?

“The literary critic as neuroscience groupie is part of a growing trend. We have become accustomed over the past half-century to critics sending out to other disciplines for “theoretical frameworks” in which to place their engagement with works of literature. The results have often been dire, the work or author in question disappearing in a sea of half-comprehended or uncritically incorporated linguistics, mathematics, psychiatry, political theory, history, or whatever. Why do critics do this?”