The same, I should note, can be said of Washington, D.C. So let me confess at the outset to my preference for the real fakery of Las Vegas over the fake reality of Santa Fe-for the genuine rhinestone over the imitation pearl.Īs Jean Baudrillard has remarked, Las Vegas is a theme park, like Disneyland, except for the fact that people live in Las Vegas. I should probably try to suppress my own utopian expectations, as well, but there is no denying that I live in Las Vegas, and have chosen to live there, when I could just as easily reside in Santa Fe. Since such discussions constitute the dream work of cultural criticism, I shall try to ground my observations, as much as possible, in my own waking experience of these places. So I am talking about resorts, about cities that market themselves as the heart’s destination. I was fearful of leaving the ordinary world of will and idea, but the promise of liberation drew me onward, onto a desert filled with the spirit of Non-Objective sensation, where nothing is real except the feeling.” No more likeness or reality, no idealistic images, nothing but a desert. The contours of the objective world fade more and more, step by step until finally the world, everything on which we have lived, becomes lost to sight. The familiar begins to recede into the background. Its ideology was probably expressed best by Kasimir Malevich in his essay “Suprematism” (1927), in which he wrote, “The ascent to the heights of Non-Objective art is arduous and painful, but is rewarding nevertheless. In its transformation into a tourist destination, Santa Fe’s indigenous iconography was adapted to Modernism’s religion of natural materials, cosmic sublimity, and Jungian primitivism-all built over a real desert.

Then, in the early 1960s, Vegas’s status as the American Lourdes of Chance was confirmed by a visit from its spiritual father, Marcel Duchamp. King, and Liberace, all residents at one time or another.

Soon after there came Howard Hughes, Orson Welles, Frank Sinatra, B.B. Las Vegas has its own hierarchy of visionaries, beginning with the gangster Bugsy Siegel, who in the 1940s invented the Strip as an oasis, a refuge for contingency and embodied desire, for iconography and idolatry in the Protestant West. Georgia O’Keefe painted the pictures of what Jung and Lawrence found. Lawrence found the same things Jung found and wrote better books about them. Carl Jung found in Santa Fe and its pueblos a perfect example of everything he wanted to find there. In the case of Santa Fe, these visionaries include General Lew Wallace, the governor of New Mexico and the author of Ben Hur, who tried, unsuccessfully, to pardon Billy the Kid, and Willa Cather, whose book, Death Comes to the Archbishop, inspired and attracted another creator of Santa Fe, Mabel Dodge Luhan, the patron who brought the cult of Modernist art to the city. One might say that Las Vegas has traditionally provided a way to “unredeem” mining and religion through gambling and prostitution.īoth cities are as much ideas as locations, then, and each has been invested with its iconography, conceptualized and ideologized by creative visionaries. Like most Western cities, it has participated in the economics of mining and religion, since it has served as a refuge from borax mining on the one hand and from the Mormon Church on the other. Las Vegas, on the other hand, has always been a whistle stop. From the beginning, Santa Fe has been a trailhead and a seat of government, and it has contributed to the administration of those two most interior of human social activities, mining and religion. Today, the two cities are bound together by the fact that both are invented communities, although we do find, in their historical precedents, manifestations of their contemporary iconography. Eventually both these Victorian cities were torn down, and the native cultures overridden by intellectual iconographies. From the late 1800s through the early 1900s, both towns were Victorian Protestant clapboard environments, a mix of colonial and indigenous cultures. At the turn of this century, Santa Fe and Las Vegas were virtually indistinguishable environments.

Dialectic essay