Dave Hickey

In its continuing evolution from adult playground to family vacation spot, Las Vegas will next attempt to solidify its fledgling cultural credentials. The Guggenheim Museum and the Venetian Resort-Hotel-Casino are negotiating a deal to create a new Guggenheim branch on an empty lot alongside the extravagant, faux-Italian, $1.5-billion hotel.

Photographs can be made without good reason, without any ostensible subject and without much care or sensibility, but they can't be made without light. Light is the catalyst, the engine, the fuel of every photographic image. It can be present in artificial or natural form, but it must be present. It delivers the wake-up call to slumbering silver salts or, nowadays, to the dormant codes of digital "film."

Scott Grieger's works from 1968-73 were made 10 years too early to get the attention they deserve. His hilarious photographs, irreverent sculptures and absurd paintings also were made on the wrong side of the country to earn more than disdain and dismissal from New York's provincial art world. Adding insult to injury, a group of New York-based artists became famous in the '80s for making art based on the same ideas Grieger had explored a decade earlier.

Art issues is dead. The provocative Los Angeles-based journal that has taken an unorthodox view of contemporary art and popular culture for the past 13 years ceased publication on Dec. 8. A letter to "readers and other interested parties" from the bimonthly magazine's publisher, Foundation for Advanced Critical Studies, put it this way: "Every project has a life.

Since the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art mounted "A San Diego Exhibition: 42 Emerging Artists" in 1985, tongues have wagged over the question of who was in and who was not. With "Civilians," the museum's latest dip into the pool of local talent, more controversy is bound to be stirred up by the man who chose the artists than by the choices themselves.

A few blocks from the home I moved into last month is a synagogue. This is certainly not surprising, as Las Vegas has one of the fastest-growing Jewish communities in the U.S. But a little over a decade ago, the area I am living in now was empty desert. So how, among the cloistered, gated subdivisions, did a synagogue appear between my house and the nearest gas station?

The Guggenheim Museum already has a branch in the real Venice--so why not an exhibition at the Venetian Resort-Hotel-Casino? Officials of the New York-based art museum and the 3,036-room luxury complex confirmed this week that they are negotiating to bring the Guggenheim's most successful show ever to the Vegas Strip. It's not a display of Picassos but "The Art of the Motorcycle."

A woman shifted her weight in her Manolo Blahniks as she considered the paintings on the wall. "I like them," she told her male companion. "They're so colorful. And naughty!" Nearby, a tagger took a swig of the beer he was carrying in a brown paper bag, while a Japanese film crew interviewed guests in the crowd. A woman wearing gold hot pants and fishnet stockings sauntered by. The purpose of the gathering, a reception for Gajin Fujita, was to celebrate his first show of paintings at the L.A.

The six solo gallery debuts in Los Angeles that I admired most this year confirm something about the new millennium that we pretty much take for granted. The city's cosmopolitanism and art's internationalism are here to stay. Two of the six artists were born in the United States. At L.A. Louver, Ben Jackel showed stoneware sculptures on militaristic themes that fuse brutality, fragility and play, while humility wrestled with grandiosity in Justin Hansch's witty paintings at Circus.