Located way off the strip, on the far end of Las Vegas Boulevard, you can’t miss one of the most expensive Nevada public art projects– a bunch of colorful rocks piled on top of each other, like a very large child put them there and forgot them.
Five years in planning and approximately three days to spray-paint and bill someone $3.5 million for colorful rocks, there are seven large chunks of rocks that have been painted really bright to gain attention from aliens from space.
This is the work of Ugo “Fingerpaint” Rondinone, an artist known for other really expensive but playful, meditative rock sculptures.
It’s about “thresholds and crossings, of balanced marvels and excessive colors, of casting and gathering and the contrary air between the desert and the city lights,” according to the artist, who doesn’t live in Las Vegas, but has a nice apartment in New York.
According to Rondione, who hasn’t answered how much he made on the exhibit himself, the site of the project isn’t a coincidence.
It’s really near Jean Dry Lake, where land art masterminds Jean Tinguely and Michael Heizer created some of the earliest, most influential “Earthwork interventions” in the 1960s. But they didn’t charge $3.5 Million and did it for the art.
On May 11, the rainbow block towers will be officially open to the public for viewing and ridicule. The piece will be on view for two years, or until the rain washes the paint away.
“When you walk among them, you feel like you’re having this quasi-spiritual experience. You also feel like you’re part of a performance,” said David Walker, executive director of the Nevada Museum of Art, the people who were left with the bill.
It’d be nice to put this into context. $3.5 MM sounds like a lot of money, but public art grants are available, and art is important. The question of whether expenditures for large art projects are warranted requires understanding the full scope of available funds, budgets, art in Nevada, and historical examples. I’d like to learn more.
I went out there last weekend and normally, I would be angry at such a waste of money, but I have to applaud Ugo Rondinone for making the Nevada Museum of Art folks look like fools.
This so called art exhibit reminds me of the nitwits who throw feces on a wall and call it art.
If Ugo Rondinone can convince the NMA to write him a check for $3.5 million for stacking stones up in the middle of the desert, good for him. They deserve to be taken if they are that foolish.
I cannot remember the dates, but on the informational plaque posted in the parking dirt, I think it said the “art” would only be there for two years? What then?
Is somebody going to pay to have it torn down? Another $3.5 million perhaps?
Yes! Art is important! But as convenient as the old slogan “Art cannot be defined!” is for those who seek to milk fools for their money, I think most of us know art when we see it and I see stacks of rocks, out of place in the middle of the desert.
But what I saw while there more important than the stacks of florescent rocks was a snake crossing the road just before I turned into the parking dirt. I call it parking dirt, because there was no parking lot, no asphalt, gravel etc.
Just a few hours before visiting the “art”, I paid $40 to have my truck washed and the minute I pulled off into the parking DIRT, my truck was totally covered in desert dust.
Back to more important than the rocks… there is no paved trail to the statues. Visitors have to walk through the desert, weaving in and out of creosote bushes for about 100 yards to the “art”.
That area is Rattlesnake country, in particular the Mojave Green Rattlesnake which is very aggressive and one of the deadliest Rattlesnakes in North America.
As I said, I passed a snake crossing the road, just about half a mile North of the parking dirt where about 10 cars were parked and a couple dozen people, several small children were walking way too close to creosote bushes without any understanding of how dangerous those bushes are mid-day as they are the ideal and chosen resting place for Rattlesnakes.
IT HAS TO HAPPEN! THERE WILL BE A HEADLINE… I hope it’s not a child.
I’ve already had my experience with a Rattlesnake and I can tell you, it changes your life forever.
Taking those creosote bushes for granted is Russian Roulette.
$3.5 million and they could not pave the parking lot and walkway to the statutes? WAY TO GO UGO!