Steve Wynn

A portrait of Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson by U.S. painter John Singer Sargent sold Wednesday for $8.8 million. Auction house Sotheby's said the 1885 painting, the top lot in the sale, was bought by casino owner Steve Wynn and would be included in his collection of art at Wynn's Las Vegas Resort and Country Club next year.

There's only a one-letter difference between "Vegas" and "vegan," but until recently the two could not have been further apart. For years, the best herbivore option in Sin City has been a nondescript shop on Spring Mountain Road called Ronald's Donuts that sells vegan doughnuts. Imagine my excitement when all 150 pounds of me read that Steve Wynn, the man behind the Encore and Wynn resorts, had gone vegan and mandated that the restaurants at these hotels have vegan menus, although I assumed that meant boring salads with pre-packaged carrot sticks, soggy tofu and absolutely no nutritional value.

Billionaire Steve Wynn, chairman of gaming company Wynn Resorts Ltd., settled a lawsuit he brought against Lloyd's of London after he accidentally tore his 75-year-old Pablo Picasso painting "Le Reve," court records indicate. Wynn, 65, whose Wynn Resorts owns casinos in Las Vegas and Macau, sued Lloyd's on Jan. 11 for documents related to the insurer's appraisal of the work, worth $139 million before it was damaged on Sept. 30.

Over the centuries, the great literary masters have taught us almost everything we need to know about the virtues of love and matrimony. But casino impresario Steve Wynn could probably write a book on the pitfalls of divorce. I'm not referring to his 2009 split with his wife, Elaine. That was gaudy enough to be covered on the gossip pages and resulted in her owning half his shares in Wynn Resorts, the publicly traded parent company of the Wynn and Encore casino-hotels on the Las Vegas Strip.

The Dream Syndicate was never quite the Los Angeles institution that, say, the Dodgers are. But the band was a seminal force in the city's '80s underground rock evolution. So now that Dream Syndicate leader Steve Wynn has gone solo, he's faced with having to redefine himself, at least musically speaking. "That's the main reason I went solo," Wynn said, pondering the Dodger analogy while taking in a recent game at the Stadium. "It's not so much redefining but undefining.

"Someone called me a grizzled veteran today." Steve Wynn laughed as he surveyed the Hollywood skyline from the Hollywood Boulevard offices of Big Time Records. Wynn is only 26, but as leader of the Dream Syndicate, he's something of an elder statesman of Los Angeles' underground rock scene. Dream Syndicate was hailed in some quarters as one of the great hopes of American rock when its 1982 debut album was released on the tiny Ruby label.

The ex-Dream Syndicate leader drifts back to crackling, '60s-style grunge on some tracks, where ringing pop melodies emerge from a sometimes chaotic din. Still reeling from his first dose of the Velvet Underground, the singer-guitarist even adopts Lou Reed's flat ironic delivery for "The Angels." But it's at the midway point that Wynn's seething tales of bad love catch fire. * Albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor), two stars (fair), three stars (good) and four stars (excellent).

"Some good noise there?" Steve Wynn muttered half-rhetorically, as his five-man band touched down from one particularly sonik journey to another Telecastersphere. The show at the Sunset in Sierra Madre on Wednesday marked Wynn's first public performance with a rock band since the dissolution of L.A.'s proto-velveteen undergrounders, the Dream Syndicate, and this mostly new outfit displayed greater range and warmth and a richer sense of texture in its musical tapestries than the old one.

For a guy spending $2.3 billion on four of the world's largest and glitziest hotels--replete with pirates, white tigers and a volcano--it might seem unusual when Steve Wynn invokes a fable like the Three Little Pigs to describe his success. But Wynn is a believer, in himself, his company and Las Vegas. His Mirage Resorts Inc. owns two of the world's largest hotels, with construction beginning this year on two more that will give the company the sixth- through ninth-largest hotels worldwide.

Can Steve Wynn hit the jackpot again? Five years after he sold his Las Vegas holdings, Wynn is returning to the Strip with the most expensive project ever seen in a city famous for its extravagant hotels. When the $2.7-billion Wynn Las Vegas opens April 28, it will compete against his former properties, including the Mirage and the Bellagio, for the high-end vacationers and gamblers that keep Vegas rolling. His company, Wynn Resorts Ltd.

There's real genius at work on a couple of fronts in Garth Brooks' new Las Vegas gig, not the least of which is how utterly anti-Vegas it is. It's got not an ounce of glitz, and that's the selling point: just Brooks -- the top-selling solo act in pop music history -- up close and very personal in the intimate 1,500-seat Encore Theatre at Steve Wynn's namesake hotel and casino. FOR THE RECORD: Garth Brooks review: In Monday's Calendar, photos taken by Henry Diltz —not Dieltz, as the credits said -- accompanied the review of Garth Brooks' Las Vegas show.

Jessica Berlin, a longtime publicist for the Vegas Cirque du Soleil shows, became one of the first full-time interactive social media representatives on the Strip about two years ago. "A lot of it was that we knew our brand was being discussed online, and we wanted to be part of that conversation." So among other activities, Berlin set up every Vegas Cirque show with its own Facebook page. When Twitter came along, she chose to have only one account, Cirque, to represent all six of the Canadian troupes' shows on the Strip "We went onto Twitter about a year and a half ago not expecting much.

In response to anti-scalping measures that Garth Brooks and the Wynn resort have put in place in connection with Brooks' forthcoming performances in Las Vegas, a consortium of ticket brokers criticized owner Steve Wynn on Tuesday for warning consumers that any tickets determined to have been sold for more than face value will be subject to cancellation and refund at face value. "Fans should have the right to buy and sell the tickets they want without having to RSVP their guests or risk cancellation based on new, arbitrary rules," the National Assn.

When Garth Brooks retired in 2001, it wasn't that he had grown immune to the rush of thousands of fans cheering him on in concert or that he'd run out of songs he relished singing. It was just that, after the collapse of his first marriage, he'd promised his daughters -- who were 4, 6 and 8 at the time -- to make his family his top priority until all three went off to college. That simply wasn't compatible with a busy touring schedule. Now, Brooks is undertaking a Las Vegas residency at billionaire Steve Wynn's resort, but the performer said last week that nothing's changed; family still comes first.

Eight years after trading in his Stetson and pop music superstardom for domestic life raising his three young daughters, Garth Brooks, the biggest-selling solo performer of all time, has decided to dust off that hat and come out of retirement -- but only on weekends. Brooks announced Thursday afternoon that he'll start a series of solo acoustic concerts in the 1,500-seat Encore Theater at the Wynn casino and resort in Las Vegas as part of a multimillion-dollar deal with Steve Wynn, the hotel's billionaire developer.

Is this the worst moment ever to open a fancy new casino? You're entitled to wonder that, given that Steve Wynn's 2,034-room, $2.3-billion Encore took its first bets Monday in the middle of a national financial nervous breakdown. But here's a question more suited to the time and place: What's in it for me? The answer at Encore is plenty.

FOR the moment, at least, the spacious executive office at the Wynn Las Vegas resort, dominated by a seminal Piet Mondrian painting, has been transformed into a Broadway piano bar. And the man singing snatches of show tunes? Chief executive Steve Wynn. "And we're so by God stubborn, we can stand touchin' noses for a week at a time and never see eye to eye," he sings, sounding like a cross between Richard Nixon and Ed Sullivan in a song from Meredith Willson's "The Music Man."

Over the centuries, the great literary masters have taught us almost everything we need to know about the virtues of love and matrimony. But casino impresario Steve Wynn could probably write a book on the pitfalls of divorce. I'm not referring to his 2009 split with his wife, Elaine. That was gaudy enough to be covered on the gossip pages and resulted in her owning half his shares in Wynn Resorts, the publicly traded parent company of the Wynn and Encore casino-hotels on the Las Vegas Strip.

"My mom is the third butt to the right in the sculpture," says Tiffany Koepp, 24. "I watched the unveiling on the local news. It was a big story at the time." Koepp is referring to the famous showgirls sculpture in front of the Riviera on the Strip that since 1997 has been a favorite backdrop for tourists' snaps. Nowadays, Koepp works as the company manager for "X Burlesque," the topless show her mom, Angela Stabile, has produced on the Strip since retiring from the stage.

Billionaire Steve Wynn, chairman of gaming company Wynn Resorts Ltd., settled a lawsuit he brought against Lloyd's of London after he accidentally tore his 75-year-old Pablo Picasso painting "Le Reve," court records indicate. Wynn, 65, whose Wynn Resorts owns casinos in Las Vegas and Macau, sued Lloyd's on Jan. 11 for documents related to the insurer's appraisal of the work, worth $139 million before it was damaged on Sept. 30.