At the opposite end of the Forum Shops at Caesars Palace, a sort of baroque moon colony completely sealed off from the outside world, with computer-controlled sky effects that cycle from rosy-fingered dawn to purple dusk on the roof vaults above, and pastiche Roman statuary, you will find Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck looking their best in their Roman attire. They are feasting under an inscription that reads The Ides of March. The feast is reminiscent of a Last Supper. Now why would Mickey and Donald celebrate with such relish just when Julius Caesar was about to be murdered, as the painting suggests? Can this be the decoration for a children's store?

Is Las Vegas for children? Yes and maybe. In spite of the numerous families that arrive with their kids, I would hardly consider Las Vegas child oriented. At the very most it is tolerant of children, but only to a degree. Consider the sign at the entrance to the Treasure Island Casino or the Mirage Casinos, "only guests of the hotel can bring in their children sitting in strollers". Yet the Treasure Island has a free show every two hours which attracts thousands of families with children and the Mirage spent millions and millions of dollars to house a family of dolphins as well as creating a little zoo, allegedly for the entertainment and "education" of the younger ones.

Disney World is about tightly scripted fun for the kids; however Las Vegas as Kurt Andersen of Time magazine wrote, is something different: "Las Vegas in spite of all the theme-park entertainment, remains the epicenter of the American id, focused on the darker stirrings of chance, liquor and sex. If it is now acceptable for the whole family to come along to Las Vegas, that's because the values of America have changed, not those of Las Vegas."

The Mirage casino offers us a glimpse of the ever increasing ersatz realities that in time might become the "real" things. The lobby of the Mirage is offered to us as a tropical rain forest, never mind that this is the desert, or better said, it is there because this is the desert. From such a "rain forest" we should learn the importance that a rain forest holds for human life, at least that is what we are told by the promotional videos on the tram leading towards the casino. Who would want to loose those exquisite palm trees (made out of plastic) that turn into a promenade for all the guests of the Casino? The fact that these palm trees are all identically bent out of shape does not seem to be of any major concern to anyone. The precious bouganvilas are also fake, like the huge stones from which tons of water cascade into a river. Even the butterflies are mechanical or electronic reproductions set to flap their colorful wings with out interruption, day in and day out. Obviously not all there is artificial, it's a careful blend of the real with the unreal, real water with plastic stones, real plants with fake butterflies, real tourists with surrogate ones (these latter ones being security people).

Just as Las Vegas has been a forerunner for post-modernist architecture, I believe that this incredible city, which operates at full steam 24 hours a day, can in time become the cultural capital of the world. We already have Van Gogh, Monet, Cezanne and Picasso making their first appearances there, and cities like Paris, Venice, New York, Cairo and Rome, are well on their way to being re created, and the list surely to grow.

I cannot wait for someone in the 21st century to make a city attempting to imitate Las Vegas, in Japan for instance. Just imagine they would now have to reproduce a large chunk of the world already reproduced in Las Vegas. A copy of the copy, now that is an idea. While all of this happens Las Vegas will remain a photographers paradise as well as a cultural frontier to explore the intellectual intricacies of where reality resides. Jorge Luis Borges had it right in his Aleph when he described the magical point where all places are seen from every angle.

December 1998

[ FYI: All images where taken with a Kodak Digital Science 260 camera]

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