Wolfe saw Vegas as corruption of modernism, not its repudiation

Evidence

Despite his personal failure, due to criminal overreaching of Hollywood-heroic proportion, just as in Warren Beatty’s subsequent film, ”Siegel’s aesthetic, psychological and cultural insights, like Cezanne’s, Freud’s and Max Weber’s, could not die. The Siegel vision and the Siegel aesthetic were already sweeping Las Vegas like gold fever… . All over Las Vegas the incredible electric pastels were repeated. Overnight the Baroque Modern forms made Las Vegas one of the few architecturally unified cities of the world—the style was Late American Rich—and without the bother and bad humor of a City Council ordinance” (11–12). Wolfe’s invocation of modernist heros Cézanne, Freud, and Weber is heavily ironic, even mock-heroic. The Siegel aesthetic and the Siegel vision, imposing unity from above in a totalizing sweep just as postmodern manifestos like Venturi’s accuse modernism of doing, in fact have nothing in common with (what imagined itself as) pure, disinterested, anticapitalist modernism that repudiates and replaces a ”Baroque” derivative corruption or bastardization, motivated only by ”gold fever.” … Las Vegas postmodern has nothing to do, for Wolfe, with the populism of the ”ugly and ordinary” that Venturi et al. discover there. It has to do not with the repudiation but with the corruption of modernism—its cooptation by big violent money for ”Late American Rich,” the ideological opposite (but is it really the dialectical twin, or the repressed political unconscious) of the postmodern demotic everyday Venturi et al. espouse. ”Without the bother and bad humor of a City Council ordinance”: neither democracy nor populism, for Wolfe, is the name of this game. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 294

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Wolfe elevated customized cars to high-art status against corporate culture — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 267; Wolfe inhabited the undecidable cusp between modern and postmodern — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 284; Sixties counterculture found itself at home in Vegas because postmodernity emerged seamlessly from it — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 355 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Wolfe inhabited the undecidable cusp between modern and postmodern #corroborates (0.90) — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 284
• Duke’s Vegas belonging marks postmodernity while his horror stays modernist. #expands (0.80) — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 370
• Sixties counterculture found itself at home in Vegas because postmodernity emerged seamlessly from it #qualifies (0.75) — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 355
• Thompson wrote Fear and Loathing as a sixties epitaph from an anti-Vegas stance. #contradicts (0.75) — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 310