Art doesn't just hang on walls or live in sculpture gardens anymore.

You can access artworks and experience art in new immersive ways.

Immersive art in Las Vegas-- that's this week on Nevada Week.

♪♪♪ Support for Nevada Week is provided by Senator William H. Hernstadt and additional supporting sponsors.

(Kipp Ortenburger) Welcome to Nevada Week.

Now, at one time to access works of art in Las Vegas meant visiting galleries on and off the Strip or private collections or public installations or travel to another city or country with a renowned art museum, and the way you accessed art would be more traditional, looking at art with some distance between you and the work.

But more and more art in Las Vegas is becoming an immersive experience.

Well, a unique art retail and dining space opened in Las Vegas last year that features art as an experience.

We checked it out.

(Dan Pelson) The quick answer in terms of what AREA15 is, it's the coolest place on Earth.

It's an immersive entertainment center.

It's about experiences.

It's a place for people to meet, commune, connect with each other, connect with themselves, be surrounded by art, be surrounded by great food, by incredible exhibitions.

The immersive quality of AREA15 starts outside with a collection of large sculptures, some for sale and some to stay.

Once inside the massive building just off I-15 in an industrial area of Las Vegas, guests are surrounded by artistic expression: A massive skull covered in images that change and shift; a store filled with colorful and eccentric clothing; a huge electric tree that employs light effects to simulate movement.

It really is just a place that's meant to be transformative to anyone who walks in here.

Dan Pelson is the chief operating officer of AREA15.

During the day you'll see grandparents with their grandkids, and they're having an awesome time.

But at night it's going to be that, you know, what you would expect kind of 24 to 35-year-old, very multicultural, that are looking for things that are just different, and frankly, it's not just different from the Strip.

We think it's different from everything else in the world.

On each side of the central hall of the space are more places for people to envelop themselves in art.

Omega Mart from Meow Wolf is perhaps the most recognizable.

The spin on a supermarket not only allows guests to walk through the space but touch the items on display and interact with a narrative designed to keep them guessing.

So that's what Meow Wolf and Omega Mart is really about.

You are in the art.

I mean, it's really a massive art gallery that you are in and you can touch and you can impact and change.

The consumer is in a position of power today that they've never been before.

Wink World from Chris Wink uses light, mirrors and music to give people a glimpse into the infinite.

(electronic techno sounds) Museum Fiasco also uses lights, mirrors and music to transport visitors, like Josh, who visited from El Paso, Texas.

At first it was pretty unsettling, and when the music started coming on and the lights showing up, it was actually pretty cool.

If you stare at one spot directly, it trips you out.

-Like I told him, it's on Facebook Live and just like-- -Did you?

-Yes, so I totally enjoyed the experience of it and the lights, you know, just like going in and out.

It definitely told a story, you know, so I liked that part.

-I think that it's more interesting than the other types of art I've been in, like art museums that you just walk around in.

This is more immersive and keeps your attention busy, you know.

This is not a usual art museum, but it's awesome.

Pelson believes being different from a time-honored museum is what sets AREA15 and its exhibits apart.

There's nothing wrong with going to a traditional museum where you walk around and you look at paintings on the wall.

That's great; I enjoy doing that.

But we believe generations that are coming up and becoming adults want to be in the middle of it.

They want to participate.

They want to touch it.

They want to have a sense of empowerment by being a part of that art themselves.

While AREA15 feels like a mall with retail shops and food, Pelson said it goes far beyond that.

People want to go out and experience things now.

There's easier ways, more convenient ways to get all your stuff, but experiences you have to be there physically, and that's really what we're based on.

And then if you couple it with a lot of what we believe is great art, that is further transformative.

The idea of experience is everywhere in AREA15 from the food area that features an open kitchen to amusement-type rides that whisk visitors along the ceiling.

It's meant to move the customer, touch the soul of everyone who comes in here, and then we have a bunch of other things that go on like amusement rides.

We call them activations but, you know, powered zip lines and VR rides, and we're building a 130-foot-tall bar that's called Lift Off Lounge that's going to be ready soon that goes 130 feet in the air and you get your drink.

It's an amusement ride, but it's really an experience.

Experiences have brought in locals and tourists, Pelson said.

Locals have been a big part of the success of the space, and Pelson is hopeful when international tourism returns to the city, they'll be able to lure in those tourists to lose themselves in AREA15.

Immersive art is critical to the model because there's nothing that is more transformative than art.

And art can mean a lot of things of course and people can debate this all day, but from my perspective, the definition of art is something that can transform somebody just by them seeing it or touching it or hearing it or being part of it in some way.

And the way we do it is to truly immerse yourself into it.

-The exhibits in AREA15 are interesting, but does experiencing art this way diminish the artists' vision or enhance it?

And by making Instagrammable art more immersive and experiential and Instagrammable, is it more accessible to a wider audience?

Well, joining us to talk about that is Alisha Kerlin, executive director of the Barrick Museum at UNLV; Brian "Paco" Alvarez, CEO of Psionic Artworks, and Brent Holmes, a Las Vegas-based artist.

Well, thank you so much.

"Immersive" means a lot of things, and I want to come back to one of the things that is represented in AREA15 and we represented in the package, a representation of classic art, in this case Gustav Klimt's art, but they also have a Vincent van Gogh experience there as well.

I want to talk about that and open the discussion on does this add, or does this take away from the original vision of these artists' work?

Brent, I want to start with you.

(Brent Holmes) When we're talking about the original vision of the work of someone like Gustav Klimt or Vincent van Gogh, I think it's impossible for us to say definitively what those visions were.

Now, van Gogh and Klimt did do quite a bit of writing and research.

I would say at the end of the day, these paintings were about texture and movement and the body.

This work was about a moment in a person's life in their lifetime, and I'm not certain that a bunch of digital animation added to that is an enhancement or even a complement, and in my opinion, yes, I would say that it is detrimental.

If you've seen a van Gogh in real life or Klimt in real life and then you've gone to one of these immersive experiences, despite the fact that they are stunning in their own way of visual effects and lighting, I think they lose what actually makes the art beautiful, what actually makes the art phenomenal and incredible.

-Alisha, I want to come to you too.

I mean, being that you are overseeing art that is more in the traditional sense here when you do get the stillness of an individual work and this is anything but that, what's your take on this?

(Alisha Kerlin) Well, when Brent started talking about seeing these pieces in person, I remember the time that I saw Starry Night.

I was young.

I remember seeing Starry Night like the rest of us in books, on socks, in magazines, right?

And when I saw the piece at MoMA, it was 2-1/2 by 3 feet, and the very first thing I thought was oh, this is an important moment.

I'm going to have a personal experience.

It's going to impact my life.

And then I thought oh, it's small, you know.

And then I waited for the crowd to part and I got close to it, and I realized how it was thicker than the magazine and the socks and the posters implied.

It was really thick, and I could see-- I could follow the movement of the painter's marks, and I started to get inside of the painting.

I was also-- as a painter I have a history of making work myself, so I was thinking about how it was made.

I was thinking about how I was feeling, and it was actually rougher and kind of messy in a way which made me feel a lot of things in that moment.

But when you take something like the Klimt or the van Gogh and you turn it into something, you know, a sound and immersive experience with video pouring over you, I think what's the difference between doing that to a painting and turning it into posters, and it's almost the same thing in a way.

Even though I had that experience with art and I'm a champion of standing in front of paintings and I think you can have a very impactful experience in a traditional art museum for sure, but just to speak about those particular painters, that was mine.

-Got it.

So if I understand you, it doesn't take the place of seeing the original work in front of you, and we hear this with Mona Lisa all the time of how small that painting is as well and how it's on every single shirt we can think of as well, but yet somehow enhances maybe the experience in a different way, if I'm hearing you correctly.

-Yes.

I think to really know the work, you have to be in front of it, and it's best to see art with friends, right, and share and talk to each other about it.

The kinds of things I see at the museum, you know, I see people cry.

They see art, and it's maybe the most unexpected piece.

We currently have Felix Gonzalez-Torres at the museum.

This is a famous candy spill piece, and I remember when I saw it in New York.

There was a guard standing there.

You're invited to take a piece of candy.

You know, they're individually wrapped green candies, a big pile, and they say you can take one.

And I remember I knew a little bit about the background of the piece, and I was having this like push and pull and I was-- you know, I had an emotional moment.

I cried.

Now that's here at the Barrick Museum, and I watch people have these very pure responses like ooh, I want to have some candy, to wow, I know about the history of Felix Gonzalez-Torres.

I know that he was an openly gay Cuban American artist and this piece sometimes-- you know, you can have your own experience-- but sometimes this piece represents the loss of his partner, Ross, in L.A.

This piece is called Untitled L.A. and it's 1991, the same year he died, and what does it mean to be able to reach down to this minimal artwork, very minimal, just a pile of candy on the floor-- it looks like shattered glass from far away-- take a piece of candy and eat it.

It's constantly refilled, so what does that say about rebirth?

What does that say about taking, you know, consuming?

And so, you know, when I think about van Gogh or any artwork, there is a moment of consumerism.

There's a moment of consuming it, and there's a choice that the viewer can take on how they take that in, and that's where I really hold strong.

-Alisha, so many things you said.

Paco, I'm going to go to you unfortunately.

I hope we can connect the dots here.

But I want to start with this, right?

This leap of faith that you're talking about, that a lot of critics talk about, real art has nothing.

Everything isn't spoon-fed for you.

You use your own background and experiences, but you also connect with the artist, him or herself.

Let's go back to the van Gogh experience, and let's use that as an example.

I mean, do you get those types of things from these more immersive experiences that are plastered all over the walls?

(Brian "Paco" Alvarez) Absolutely not.

You know, I had a very similar experience at MoMA.

I went and walked over to Starry Night and then it was a crowd of people, kind of like when you go to the Louvre in Paris with the Mona Lisa, everyone is trying to take a picture of a painting that's this big.

But, you know, I walked around the corner and there was Broadway Boogie Woogie by Piet Mondrian, which is my favorite artist, and I literally just started sobbing.

I was the only person in front of this painting and I said, you know, the last time I had an experience like that was when Steve and Elaine Wynn had their gallery at the Desert Inn, or what would eventually become the Wynn, and within 2,000 square feet, you had some of the greatest artists in history from a Vermeer to Andy Warhol to Picasso to Manet, Monet, in 2,000 square feet.

No respectable museum would ever put that kind of art all together within 2,000 square feet.

And then when I went to Paris-- not Paris, I was in London at the Tate Modern, and I saw six Piet Mondrian paintings in a gallery called Utopia, and again an emotional reaction.

And to see this immersive work of van Gogh, I thought the execution was very poor.

It was not what I had expected it to be.

The room was not properly built for that kind of experience.

The projection mapping wasn't great and, I mean, the attempt there, it should have been more, you know, let this be an advertising to go see the originals, you know, and work with those museums that are entrusted with that priceless collection of art.

I think in the age of technology we could do better, and they could have been a lot better.

-And we'll get to that in a second, because I know that brings up the question of access and people that maybe can't get over to Europe or can't get to MoMA potentially too.

We'll talk about that in a second.

Brent, I want to come to you also.

Let's talk about-- I mean, you are all very ingrained and ingratiated in the arts.

Let's talk about the general public, you know, the general person that comes in and maybe has never experienced, you know, let's say a van Gogh painting before.

Could they, should they, do they have visceral reactions similar to you because it's their first experience to it?

-I will never dissuade anyone from engaging with art on the most tertiary and superficial level to the most in-depth, amd the most in-depth way to engage with art is to make art, side note, just to clarify.

But I would feel with van Gogh, with these projection mapping experiences, I would much rather see our city, our institutions or the people with enough money to bring something like a touring act like this to really work to bring the actual work to Las Vegas, to really expose people to that, and as far as general public access, I mean, we're a pretty underfunded city when it comes to the arts.

We don't treat the arts very well in Las Vegas, which is funny because we use the arts a lot, and within this new kind of rise in quote unquote, immersive experiences or immersive arts, we're seeing again another wave of this kind of exploitation of the terminology that surrounds art in order to market to larger audiences.

We have in Las Vegas in particular, in Southern Nevada in general, and in the United States to a certain extent, a failure to put an appropriate value on the arts as a culture in its entirety.

It's great.

If your only experience with van Gogh is the Van Gogh Immersive Experience, I pity you.

It's great you woke up and got out of bed and decided to spend 45 bucks so you can get light projected at you that looks like a painting.

If that's the limit of your interest, okay, fine.

But why?

Why are we living in a culture where that's the limitation of someone's interest where we have, you know, enough marketing money, enough money being thrown into advertising and billboard and digital marketing that we could afford to ship five van Goghs to an institution in Las Vegas and say-- and we could afford to make it free for all.

We could afford to make it free for the general public, and we could bus children in with the amount of money that gets spent so these people can make major profit margins.

So what I call in question there is our value sets and that these people proclaiming to care about the arts, do they care about the arts?

Because I think they care about the dollar.

-I want to pop in because let's talk about it, and I don't mean to center this on just AREA15.

So please, if there's other exhibits or installations we want to talk about, let's talk about that.

But I want to bring up some of the things that are in AREA15 that are more immersive and more new and that their new art, new artists have developed those.

Omega Mart comes to mind, Wink World comes to mind.

Museum Fiasco comes to mind.

We featured those in our package here.

Alisha, let's talk about that.

Installations like that, do they promote local art?

-So again, I'm going to bring up a personal reaction, a specific piece I really appreciated at Omega Mart.

You go into the grocery store, right, and you go through the freezer.

You open the door, and you walk through a little freezer.

You can almost hear the crackling of ice, and there's these melted Coke bottles, right?

It's just so well done and, you know, I had this response, and it doesn't matter what I think, right?

Doesn't matter my taste, but when I found out that Brent Sommerhauser, a local artist, made that I was like right on, that's so great, you know.

So I just wish that there could be a story about the artists that participated.

There could be some celebration about those artists.

There is a little text panel that lists all the artists, but I want to celebrate that more.

And that may be my position working at Las Vegas' only art museum.

It's a free museum, and post-pandemic we've made a major shift in our programming to support local artists and put them in touch with major artists like Felix Gonzalez-Torres and many others.

And back to Brent's point, if I may about access, as a free museum in the city on a university campus, we see people who are visiting a campus for the very first time and a museum for the very first time.

You bring an English 101 class, for example, maybe three people raise their hand.

I've been to a contemporary art museum or art museum or museum period, and these are people who are young adults, right?

And I don't want to say like oh, that's so sad, everybody needs to have a museum experience, but what I do want to say is it's a great privilege.

If you're providing a first-time art experience to someone, that's a privilege and you should take it seriously, right?

And the benefit of working at the Barrick is we can say this artwork by this local artist is serious art, and this local artist went to the high school that you went to and lives in this city and makes a living and spends an important life making art, and that's just a privilege and responsibility.

-I think one of the points you hit on there is that art is fundamental in the way that we develop as human beings and the way we can perceive ourselves and our own values, and to personalize that, to make that local, to make that part of a person's experience.

And I think when we get into a conversation about somewhere like AREA15, when we have those dialogues, I see a lot of really interesting, clever, beautiful stuff, I question how intimate a relationship with the actual artists, the actual creators of the work the audiences can engage.

And then I question if that's your first art experience, if that's what you think, oh, well, this is art, does it make it easier to dismiss going to a museum and does it make it-- what value set are we now placing on finding out that person you went to high school with actually made a major work of art?

Well, you know, it's not in Omega Mart, or who knows.

-Paco, I want to come to you on this too.

Let's talk more about the local connection between artists and maybe an installation like Omega Mart here first, and this accessibility question.

Could it be a portal to individuals that have never experienced art?

They get a little taste of that, and maybe that opens them up?

But as we've already talked about, the limitation here is on something like that, you don't necessarily know who the local artists are, so navigating that could be very difficult.

What's your take on that?

-It's a tough one because I believe in equity, and I believe that, you know, art and museums should be accessible to all groups.

And I don't necessarily see a for-profit venture being very equitable in that case.

You know, to point to what Alisha said, you know, her museum is free, and most major museums globally are free.

You know, governments around the world, countries around the world, cultures around the world-- and I'm wearing my anthropologist hat-- see the importance of the creative economy.

So museums are very important to the community, and AREA15 is not a museum.

It is a for-profit venture, and it's expensive.

-Very important, very important.

It is, and we didn't get to talk about ticket sales very much, but it is a ticketed experience.

Well, Paco, Brent and Alisha, thank you so much; we appreciate it.

Well, an art form that is almost singularly associated with Las Vegas is neon.

The city is famous for its incredible neon signs that have lined the Strip and Downtown.

The Neon Museum preserves those artworks and allows artists to use them to create something entirely new, including immersive experiences, and the Nevada Week team did get to check it out.

At the Neon Museum, every sign tells a story.

The signs speak for the artists who produced them, the companies that the signage represented, and the city of Las Vegas.

(Aaron Berger) The mission of the Neon Museum is one, to both preserve and present the history of Las Vegas.

We do it in a really unique medium by showcasing the actual signage of the wonderful casinos, the restaurants and the stores that have made this town.

The Neon Museum visitors can see some of the surviving signs in the outdoor exhibition spaces.

There are more than 800 signs total in the collection; 250 of those are on display, and of those, 24 currently glow, letting their true beauty shine.

The signs are artistic in nature.

So what I mean by that is we're using these signs very intentionally.

Everything from the shape of the sign, which is pointing to an actual destination, to the creation of the neon that's actually illuminating in the night.

At the Neon Museum, Craig Winslow's Brilliant art exhibit illuminates viewers to the past, present and the future of art.

(Craig Winslow) Brilliant is an immersive experience.

It combines light and sound and brings history of Las Vegas back to life by reviving these old, broken, thought-of-dead signs back to life in a way they never would have been able to before.

The Brilliant exhibition began with a significant amount of research.

A big part of bringing Brilliant to life is diving into the Neon Museum's archives and searching for postcards, for home videos, any sort of historical references with which I can digitally trace these signs and see what they used to look like as a way to bring them back to life.

Brilliant utilizes eight projectors and 24 channels of surround sound, and projection mapping totally immerses viewers in the experience.

The technology is contained within two climate-controlled towers that are sealed to protect it from the desert's harsh elements.

Brilliant is really unique in today's modern art experiences because it brings art and technology together with history and truly tells this beautiful narrative of these signs being able to shine for you again.

In the past, the iconic signage housed at the Neon Museum served to attract customers to Las Vegas.

Today these signs are preserving the area's history and inspiring modern art.

For Nevada Week, I'm Natalie Cullen.

-Amazing.

Well, thank you, Natalie, we appreciate it.

And thank you, as always, for joining us this week on Nevada Week.

Now, for any of the resources discussed on the show, please visit our website at vegaspbs.org/nevadaweek.

You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter at @nevadaweek.

Thanks again, and we'll see you next week.

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