Fake Vegas explored

My latest Business Press column is out, in which I turn an offhand comment by an LA Times movie reviewer into grist for 550 words about Fake Vegas. From the LVBP:

Casinos, certainly, have taken their place as legitimate businesses, and a former Harvard business professor runs the world’s biggest gaming company. So it’s not a question of whether people take casinos seriously — they are so potentially lucrative that everyone, particularly state-level politicians, pay attention.

No, it’s a deeper question, an existential query about the role of Las Vegas in the world.

Are we really living in what Hal Rothman called the first city of the 21st century? Are we the shock troops of the continuing transition to a service economy? Is Las Vegas a city that points the way to the future?

Or is it just a place where people come to drink footballs full of beer and yard-long margaritas and play nickel slots? Is Las Vegas really hip, or is it a city that real hipsters condescend to visit with a knowing smirk at the cheesiness factor?

Can a land that was once the king of fake be taken seriously?

Does it matter if most of Las Vegas is just an imitation of someplace else? I think it does, because eventually the appeal of the fake wears off. So the recent move to build properties that are just themselves–not fake somewhere else–is a good one.

This doesn’t mean that Fontainebleau and the LV Plaza (should it happen) should be lumped in with the fakes of the past. They are just Vegas outlets of budding (international) hospitality brands. No one would say that the Las Vegas Hilton is an enlarged copy of the Beverly Hilton–it’s been one of the most “authentic” Las Vegas casinos for almost 40 years. I see the Font and LVP as in that same mold.