(5) - By Andres Martinez - Slate Magazine

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To: Posted Monday, Oct. 19, 1998, at 3:30 AM ET

I went from craps to Cézanne in three minutes, 12 seconds and probably could have made it in two minutes flat, if the art gallery attendant hadn't detained me to show me how the audio guide worked. Such is the "new" Las Vegas.
I had intended in good conscience to share with you a whole laundry list of other stats on Steve Wynn's stunning new $1.6 billion Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas. Alas, my promised media kit hasn't been delivered.
Did you know France exports mud? It's true. The purveyor of all things fine to snobs everywhere exports mud.
Having gone 32 years, somehow, without ever having got a mud wrap, I wasn't sure what the etiquette was when Mireille Alfa, the resort's head aesthetician, allegedly from Paris, was covering my body with mud. Should I strive for reverential silence or friendly chitchat? No longer able to take the pressure, I cracked. "I suppose you saved this dirt from the construction site," I teased.
Mireille was not amused. "All good mud for Moor wraps comes from the coast of Brittany," she said sternly. Once I'd got over the disappointment of not having my eyes covered with cucumbers--one of the motivations behind this indulgence, I must confess--I fell into that soothing purgatory between wakefulness and sleep.
When Mireille and I parted, she suggested I also take a Vichy shower in the spa, a suggestion that, needless to say, I found rather offensive, not to mention unpatriotic. I almost told her to go get a Pétain facial but then thought better of it. I did stay on for a very proper posh-spa workout. That is, I spent 12 minutes on a treadmill and two hours consuming a variety of juices, watching college football games, sitting in a hot tub, and sweating in the steam room, all the while doing my best to go through as many towels as some small nations do in a month. This all in an attempt to get physically geared up for a night of the most stressful form of relaxation invented by man: casino gambling.
Casinos have always known that a little disorientation goes a long way toward loosening a patron's grip on his wallet. You've heard of all the tired old tricks employed by casino moguls. Hide the clocks, the sunlight, and the cash, and ply your gamblers with free drinks, provided by mesmerizing waitresses prancing about in what Tom Wolfe once described as "buttocks décolletage." Better yet, have them gamble in a pyramid, a pirates' den, or a fake Manhattan in the middle of the desert. Self-parodying kitsch, stressing the absurdity of life, makes people laugh, shake their heads, and take cash advances on their credit cards. Kitsch is good.
Now Wynn, Las Vegas' most visionary hotelier, has taken this disorientation to new heights with his Bellagio Hotel. Instead of adding to the city's collection of ever more theatrical, excessively themed hotels, Wynn has done something truly shocking. He has blown an unfathomable sum building a hotel dripping with taste in the very heart of the Strip. He has wooed New York's Le Cirque 2000, San Francisco's Aqua, and a dozen other renowned eateries to his beloved Bellagio, along with such retailers as Tiffany's, Armani, Chanel, and a place whose name I cannot recall that sells sparkling $2,789 shoes. But most crazily, as you've probably heard by now, Wynn has amassed a world-class art collection valued at more than $300 million to display at the resort.
No amount of free drinks or sleepless nights could ever match the disorienting power of finding a sublime art gallery, the intimacy and selectivity of which bring to mind Washington's Phillips Collection, under the same roof as a casino--just around the corner, past the conservatory. One minute you are walking down the Strip with what seems like half of America hunting for those $4.99 dinner buffets, and the next you are admiring such gems as van Gogh's Peasant Woman Against a Background of Wheat, for which Wynn reportedly paid $47.5 million, and Edgar Degas' Dancer Taking a Bow.
But disoriented or not, I am off to the baccarat tables to play the role of False Pretender among the millionaire players in town to help Wynn and his celebrity buddies open the joint. That's because I am writing Doubling Down, a book on the Las Vegas phenomenon, and its clever gimmick has me gambling away my advance. My pitch to publishers was as simple as the game of baccarat itself: Give me a decent bankroll to go gambling for a month in Vegas, and I'll write about it. Amazingly, somebody bought it. My weekend at the Bellagio is to be my book's epilogue and my final, mano a mano showdown with Mr. Wynn.