Venice in Vegas

Eager to spend quality time with me, once every few weeks Shui invites me to go on a vacation with him. "I wanna go to Vegas again. Do you wanna go?" he'll ask. Although I appreciate his zeal to deepen our friendship, it appears that I'm just not as amicable as he is; I'm just not committed enough to shell out the money for a room, and eating out every meal for the duration of the trip. When I decline, I am overwhelmed by his esteem for me. A barrage of entreaties to join him, sincere expressions of our friendship, and pleas for a reconsidering of my decision quickly ensue my refusal. These rejoinders always culminate in variations on one particular theme: "If you go, you can drive your Prius, and use your great gas mileage. Don't you want to make the most of your mileage?"

So I finally capitulated and agreed to accompany Chuckie, Auggie, and him on a Sunday through Tuesday jaunt to Sin City; Shui had gotten a discount on suite at the Venetian.

Old World and classical themes apparently hold a big attraction for the designers of the Las Vegas casinos: Caesar's Palace, the Venetian, Bellagio, Luxor, etc. I think the owners are trying to evoke the grandeur, power, and opulence of the civilizations represented in these themes; it is curious that they have simultaneously channeled those societies widely held as the most prodigal, licentious, and generally dissolute.

Initially, the gambling establishments of the Strip render the desired effect on the eye of the observer. I was impressed by the Venetian's high, Sistine Chapel-inspired ceilings, its faux canal and gondola rides, the floor-to-ceiling marble. Even the fake sky painted on the ceiling of the indoor mall impressed me the first time I saw it. It didn't take long, however, for the illusion to melt away; and once it did, it revealed a pretentious "monument to bourgeois taste" (quote from the West Wing--don't you love the pop-cultural references?)

It all became too gaudy, too gimmicky, too garish. Everything gilded, everything lacquered, everything manicured and made over to hide what's really underneath. What's worse, it all feeds middle class pretensions: you have the feeling of having traveled to the great cities of the world without actually having been there. Venice, Paris, Rome, New York--all in less than 24 hours!

The point of these themed casinos isn't to endow patrons with culture or cultivation, to propel them toward a new level of sophistication; it's to provide the illusion of refinement. Art not for art's sake; neither for the artist, nor for the observer, but for Mammon. "Why travel to the Old World, when for less than half the price you can come to Vegas AND gamble?" the marketing suggests. Sigh. Just when you thought our society couldn't get any more trailer park (nothing against my friends in the trailer parks)...And here I am soaking it all in.

All of this reflecting on Vegas recalled recent reading I've been doing of John Ruskin (Victorian genius). He was a political commentator, an art critic, a literary critic, essayist, thinker, philosopher, &c, &c. In one collection of essays, The Stones of Venice, Ruskin reads the history of Venice through her architecture (really, a brilliant method). In particular, he traces the Venetian decadence from her heyday as a mercantile power, and attributes the fall to the city's wanton intemperance. How telling, how appropriate...one is almost tempted to read the same fate into this city, this new Venice.

For my more adventurous readers, I have compiled some excerpts from the Stones of Venice that seemed befitting. For those with an inclination toward moralizing (and I am among you!) read on. If you're not in the mood, don't feel obliged to trudge through Ruskin.

This rationalistic art is the art commonly called Renaissance, marked by a return to pagan systems...Gods without power, satyrs without rusticity, nymphs without innocence, men without humanity, gather into idiot groups upon the polluted canvas, and scenic affectations encumber the streets with preposterous marble. Lower and lower declines the level of absurd intellect; the base school of landscape gradually usurps the place of historical painting...

Nor is it merely wasted wealth or distempered conception which we have to regret in this Renaissance architecture: but we shall find in it partly the root, partly the expression, of certain dominant evils of modern times--over-sophistication and ignorant classism; the one destroying the healthfulness of general society, the other rendering our schools and universities useless to a large number of the men who pass through them.

...we shall soon feel that in those meager lines there is indeed an expression of aristocracy in its worst characterisitics; coldness, perfectness of training, incapability of emotion, want of sympathy with the weakness of lower men, blank, hopeless, haughtly self-sufficiency. All these characterisitics are written in the Renaissance architecture as plainly as if they were graven on it in words.

...sensuality and idolatry had done their work, and the religion of the Empire was laid asleep in a glittering sepulchre.

Perhaps most fitting:
One by one the possessions of the state were abandoned to its enemies; one by one the channels of its trade were forsaken by its more energetic rivals; and the time, the resources, and the thoughts of the nation were exclusively occupied in the invention of such fantastic and costly pleasures as might best amuse their apathy, lull their remorse, or disguise their ruin.