BluefoxToday blog : CityCenter by MGM Mirage spiffs up with art

CityCenter has for some time made nice-sized headlines with the scope of the mammoth project and its upward-revised $8 billion price tag. This cost figure will buy the gaming giant one of the most unique resort experiences in the world of leisure and entertainment. The small city within Las Vegas will feature a large casino, standard condominiums, condo hotels, a wide variety of retail and dining space, thousands of hotel rooms of course and a convention facility. With that package it deserves to be called a city-within-a-city.

CityCenter wants to do more, however. Any major city worldwide can display a fair dose of art, any kind of art, to give it a wider base to stand on. To bless it with sophistication, to endow it with legitimacy.

Following that script MGM Mirage will spend $40 million to acquire contemporary art for the development on the Strip and obviously desires to bring Las Vegas to some degree out from the shadows and onto the world stage as a noteworthy urban center. The artists who are commissioned to provide the works are among the elite in the business and surely give the effort a strong start.

One of them is Maya Lin, creator of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., who will shape a huge silver cast of the Colorado River to be hung over the resort's lobby area. Richard Long's two large mud wall drawings, for details on that kindly Google the topic, will enhance public space at the Veer Towers, a condominium component. And Frank Stella will supply his "Damascus Gate Variation I" for the Vdara Condo Hotel as its reception area's backdrop.

This is just a small sample of what to look for when the place opens late in 2009.