Sin city slickers: critic and curator Dave Hickey, long a luminary of the Las Vegas—and international—art scene, selected work by 26 former students for an exhibition at the city's only museum for contemporary art

Las Vegas is many things, but a city known for its patronage of the arts it is not. Even art world insiders are surprised to learn that there is an ambitious venue for contemporary art here--no, it's not the Guggenheim branch at the Venetian hotel and casino, but the Las Vegas Art Museum. I count myself among the surprised. When I relocated from New York in the fall of 2007 to teach in the art department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, I had little sense of what a "Vegas art scene" might hold. True, LVAM is outside city limits, about eight miles from the Strip in the upper-income suburb of Summerlin, where it shares a building with the community library. But its presence--and recently announced plans for a 97,000-square-foot facility just off the Strip--attest to a serious commitment to contemporary art in Las Vegas.

This fall, LVAM hosted the exhibition "Las Vegas Diaspora: The Emergence of Contemporary Art from the Neon Homeland," featuring locally nurtured talent curated by a hometown critic. The critic is Dave Hickey, who taught criticism and theory in the art department at UNLV from 1990 until 2001 and is known for his contentious writings on art and common culture. To view recent work by 26 of Hickey's former students is to recognize how the atmosphere of Las Vegas has stimulated the production of contemporary art that, like the city itself, occupies a unique visual territory.

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That territory is marked by lots of painting in bright acrylics and acid-toned polymers, an often hard-edged abstraction that resuscitates the precision and (ironic?) vapidity associated with Neo-Geo in the '80s. Other telling materials include polystyrene, anodized aluminum, automobile paint, Plexiglas and acrylic applied with airbrush. Like the city itself, the look is high on artifice, low on nuance. Also like Vegas, much of the work is infused with a sense of the risky or risque that can, ultimately, seem closer to Disney than to danger.

The strengths of individual artists could, at first, get lost in the wealth of hard edges and bright colors. Gajin Fujita is among the many artists in the show who have established notable early careers--in 2006 he had exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, and was included in the 2001 SITE Santa Fe biennial, organized by Hickey--and in two works here sustained the irresistible mode he has employed since his student years in the late '90s. Fujita fuses imperial Japanese imagery--phoenixes, geishas, warriors and the like--with East L.A. street tags, using both gilt and spray paint. It's like finding an Edo-period painting on a barrio wall. In a painting that uses gold leaf in the imperial style, a Japanese warrior on horseback is embedded in a thicket of graffiti that includes the titular phrase "Ride or Die." The fusion is not a new idea. Japanese youth culture has long been fascinated with hip-hop and gangsta rap. But Fujita pushes it to the extreme, and his large-scale panels--the larger of the two here is more than 10 feet wide--are about as attention-grabbing as painting gets.

Sush Machida also uses traditional Eastern imagery, in his case to suggest the visual culture of a global economy in paintings that extend the "superflat" mode associated with Takashi Murakami. Drawing on Japanese folklore and, it seems, the cult of European luxury goods among wealthy Japanese, Machida's imagery involves uneasy pairings such as the peasant tale of Taketori Okina juxtaposed with bottles of Chanel No. 5 (Taketori Okina Tiger, 2007). His acrylic paintings framed in clear Plexiglas, sleek and expensive-looking, also suggest the visual clash of transplanted communities everywhere, with knock-off luxury goods and artifacts of cultural heritage side by side. But unlike Murakami (who has designed his own line of Louis Vuitton handbags), Machida strikes a critical note in his deployment of luxury brands that might extend to a critique of art as the ultimate commodity.

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Historical appropriation found broad expression in the show and represented its major strength. In addition to the work of Fujita and Machida, several other examples were thoughtful, critical and funny all at once. James Gobers 16-foot-wide triptych Ridicule Is Nothing to be Scared Of (2005) refers to both Adam Ant (the refrain of his 1981 hit "Prince Charming" is "Ridicule is nothing to be scared of/Don't you ever... / Stop being dandy/showing me you're handsome") and William Hogarth's comedies of manners. As is typical of Gobel's work, the piece allegorizes contemporary gay culture, "bears" (beefy, hairy gay men) in particular. Dandies in baroque finery cavort and strut like peacocks, overindulged and overfed. Remarkably, Gobel creates this elaborate fantasy tableau, set against a mountain landscape, in a patchwork of felt and yarn, underscoring the soft, effeminate mood.