by Alex Wells
Los Angeles County Museum of Art director Michael Govan recently announced plans to share work with the soon-to-be Las Vegas Museum of Art, apparently opening in 2028. The plan has proved controversial, largely because the idea of lending parts of the collection to Las Vegas while LACMA is in the middle of being renovated to become smaller seems like a very strange way to deploy the resources of the museum and its donors. The county of Los Angeles has art, why not have it where we can look at it?
The Footnote, however, is resigned. Journalists and intellectuals have likely been complaining about how museums are run since Princess Ennigaldi invented them in 530 BC. Despite this, we still attend, recommend and venerate them and likely always will. But moreover, this latest scheme by Govan and the LACMA board is simply another chapter in the long story of the torrid situationship between the city of Los Angeles and Las Vegas.
Long-time Angelenos all know this story: you have a friend who is a chef, or addicted to gambling, or just wants to be able to afford a house with a lawn and no view. They talk until their lease is up about all the benefits of moving to Vegas—the parties, the wild characters, the desert hikes—then they do it. They leave, you visit them, they complain constantly, and they return a year or two later, cursing the desert city and unable to remember anything. Why should our works of art be denied the same pleasure?
Long ago LA took on a devil’s bargain: Vegas would provides a default place for the less-famous members of our population to take cheap mini-vacations where they meet all the Americans scared to go LA, and in return, the people of LA would rotate through Vegas and, in doing so, class it up a little. Most Angelenos I know have spent more time in Vegas than they have in Venice Beach. If there is harm in storing our art there, it is no more than we have been doing to ourselves all along.
Image: Courtesy Las Vegas Museum of Art