[With thanks to GC in no_nv for the tip, below, follow-up to an earlier post on the CCAI Blog, a story from Agence France Presse on the closing of the Las Vegas Art Museum.]Art-lovers despair as lights go out for Vegas museum
by Steve Friess
LAS VEGAS, Nevada (AFP) – Museums dedicated to neon, Liberace and pinball machines remain, but Las Vegas's more high-brow cultural scene has achieved a new nadir: Sin City is now the largest metropolitan area in the United States without a public art museum.
The 59-year-old Las Vegas Art Museum went broke and shut down, the latest in a string of bad news for the arts that also included the closure last year of a Guggenheim outpost in the Venetian Hotel-Casino and the decision in 2007 by Steve Wynn to convert a gallery at his Wynn Las Vegas resort into a Rolex shop.
"This is a community of two million people and it doesn't have a museum," said Libby Lumpkin, the LVAM's last executive director, who quit in January hoping to save the institution money.
"That's not a good thing. It's just really disappointing."
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[graphic from image search for 'Las Vegas.']
