Much like food in a pill, Reagan’s “Star Wars” initiative, and Heidi Montag’s singing career, Las Vegas’s art scene is widely regarded as a half-baked idea that, while heavily bankrolled (at least in the beginning), never really got off the ground. On vacation in Sin City last week, I scoured the strip for any signs of remaining cultural life now that much of the city’s cultural funding and many of its art professionals have left the area. My conclusion? Whatever art is left in Vegas won’t be there for long.

One sign that the proverbial canary in the Vegas art-scene mineshaft has expired came last July, when academic couple David Hickey and Libby Lumpkin — prominent champions of the arts and the visionary force behind the now-shuttered Las Vegas Art Museum — left the city in defeat. Then, in October, the Liberace Museum became the latest in a long line of the city’s cultural institutions to close due to lack of funds. These blows were temporarily countered by an influx of public art courtesy of CityCenter, a shiny hotel and shopping mall complex that opened in 2009 as home to one of the nation’s largest public installations of corporate-owned art, including sculptures by Claes Oldenburg and Henry Moore. But even public art, everyone’s favorite cultural fix-it, can’t cure Las Vegas’s art problem.

It’s not that there aren’t any other art institutions left in the city. The Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art consistently mounts new — though not necessarily good — exhibitions featuring works from the hotel’s impressive holdings together with borrowed work from venerable collections like the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Though many downtown galleries have closed in the last few years, others, like Brett Wesley Gallery and nonprofit collective Emergency Arts, have remained open. But the Guggenheim’s effort at opening a museum in Vegas, in collaboration with Russia’s Hermitage museum, met an ignominious, gasping end in 2008 after only 15 months of operation — an indicator of the city’s lack of cultural oxygen.

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