Dorothy Barenscott, Learning From Las Vegas Redux (2021)

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CHAPTER 10

Learning from Las Vegas Redux: Steve Wynn and the New Business of Art Dorothy Barenscott

In 1972, when architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour traveled to Las Vegas to undertake what would become one of the boldest indictments of modernism and traditional notions of built space, they dared to approach the urban environment of the Las Vegas Strip on its own terms. Learning From Las Vegas became one of the most significant texts heralding the postmodern turn—a treatise that not only called for a re-examination of foundational thinking around the city and architecture, but also an invitation to view and apprehend the spaces of the city as a field of aesthetic relationships, receptive and open to changing cultural signs and cues, tastes, notions of beauty, embodied experiences, and the like. “To question how we look at things” argued the book’s authors is a way of becoming “revolutionary.”1 Two decades later in the 1990s, when American businessman, casino magnate, and art collector Steve Wynn systematically began the wholesale transformation of his business—taking the casino hotel experience from

D. Barenscott (B) Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Surrey, BC, Canada e-mail: dorothy.barenscott@kpu.ca © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 G. Blair and N. Bronstein (eds.), The Politics of Spatial Transgressions in the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55389-0_10

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