Las Vegas Art Museum Is Closing

by Deidre Woollard (RSS feed)
Feb 21st 2009 at 7:02PM

It looks like art will be increasingly hard to find in Las Vegas. I wrote last April about the closing of the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum in the Venetian. Now the Las Vegas Sun reports that the Las Vegas Art Museum is closing its doors. The museum will close on February 28th. It will keep its name and remain an entity with the hope of opening up its doors again in better times. Like many other museums, the LVAM has been suffering from a lack of donations. The museum cut spending and jobs less than three months ago in an effort to keep the museum viable. The museum began 59 years ago as an art league and became a fine art museum in 1974. It specializes in contemporary art and is currently showing an exhibit featuring 20 emerging artists who live and work in Los Angeles, California.

Tags: art museum, ArtMuseum, culture in trouble, CultureInTrouble, las vegas, LasVegas

Filed under: Art

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beanspants Feb 23rd 2009 5:26PM

good. I always found the $6 buffet and stupid entertainment at Circus Circus of 1990s and earlier Vegas more honest than the art gallery and sprinkler shows of 2000s Vegas.

The Greatest Las Vegas Project Feb 24th 2009 8:19PM

Arts and Business innovation is NOT dead in Vegas! I’m seeing success, but until now my experience with the arts organizations, such as a the ballet, art museum, is their” "street" marketing to the masses, was all but non existent. Is Vegas' transitory population out of reach, brand identity building, web presence building, media events all seemed below the "Ivy tower or civil servant mentality of these organizations. In New York & LA, you see banners, for arts organizations everywhere, store windows, t-shirts, coffee mugs, tote bags, the same is needed here. I tried to bring these "Low brow" methods used in New york and LA here, which worked for ages to develop major theater companies etc. Arts marketing as Andy Warhol did, is a mass art, and that is what I see as the major reason, lack of "will" to reach out on the media and street level. Certainly curators need to decide the art in the shows, but media marketing needs gutsy, daring, even edgy approaches, which I am using to “global” success in “The Greatest Las Vegas Project”. Hundreds of suburban small mini malls, could have displayed banners, posters etc, reaching the "masses" for example. My arts, business project is doing exactly that, “Low brow maybe, but we are reaching 300,000 now and growing: “The Greatest Las Vegas project”:

http://www.myspace.com/thegreatestlasvegas

Innovation, “media reach” is not dead. if you use it effectively, even in Vegas’ hardship.