ABSTRACT
The city baffles with gauche spectacles of desire and risk. But the city is also impossible to ignore: as Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour suggest in Learning from Las Vegas, the Strip replaces modern architecture with a jumbled madness of kitsch and symbolism, which ‘includes at all levels,’ drawing diverse signs together in startling juxtapositions. Other casinos stage virtual cities without reference to concrete geography: the MGM Grand, the most aptly named Mirage. The audacious, tawdry circus display—complete with female objectification, danger to the innocent, animal violence, Roman excess, the carnivalesque—touches on something fundamental to Las Vegas, and through it, the twisted hypocrisies of the American dream. Vegas is home to an elaborate and terrible theatre scene: stages for musical tours from Broadway, but also several regular Cirque du Soleil shows, burlesque cabarets, and music acts frozen in time, like Donny and Marie Osmond or Celine Dion.
