Re-sensing Las Vegas: aesthetic entrepreneurship and local urban culture

Abstract

Cities are dense, sensory environments that provide various stimuli that require interpretation and representation. The embodied sensuous lived experience of urban life, however, is much more dynamic and fluid than any one representation can encompass. A conflict often emerges between the dominant image of a city and what actually happens in it. As such, this creates a tension about a city’s ‘sense of place.’ I employ the notion of ‘aesthetic entrepreneurship’ to designate the practices of certain individuals who seek to create new senses of place in the face of opposition or in times of social crisis. I explore the ways aesthetic entrepreneurs have used sensory knowledge to create alternative narratives and images of Las Vegas after the economic crash of 2008. Each of the aesthetic entrepreneurs discussed here has actively sought to develop a new sense of place for a city popularly defined by its dominant neon imagery.

Keywords:

• Urban experience
• entrepreneurship
• imagery
• culture
• senses
• Las Vegas

Acknowledgments

Parts of this article were presented at the 2014 Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction in San Francisco, California. Maggie Kusenbach and Stella Capek offered helpful comments during that session. Thanks to Emily Talen and the anonymous reviewers for their informative and constructive comments. A thank you also to Wes Myles, Amy Finchem, and Mark Hall-Patton for being generous with both their time and interpretations.

Notes

1. The political and legal boundaries of the City of Las Vegas are much smaller than expected since it leaves out the Strip altogether. As such, a better estimate for the population of Las Vegas, much of which exists as unincorporated towns within Clark County, is the total population of Clark County, which, at the time of writing, is about 2,027,868. Las Vegas proper is at about 596,424 (US Census Bureau).

2. This work is based on field research conducted in Las Vegas utilizing a ‘grounded theory’ approach (Charmaz 2006). Data were culled from interviews, observations, and archival analysis of local print and online news media. Though I have interviewed, observed, and analyzed the media accounts of other ‘local celebrities’ as part of this project, the three presented in this article best exemplify the traits of aesthetic entrepreneurship, an analytical concept that emerged during, and not before, the research. Of note, all names of individuals, as well as the city and places within it (for an argument in favor of naming the places we study; Borer 2010, 99), are the actual names of the individuals because each either gave consent to use their names or their names were printed in publicly available material. This may limit the representativeness of the sample or generalizability of the analysis, but the goal and accomplishment of ‘thick description’ keeps the intellectual worth intact and follows the precepts of the humanities rather than the strict and often abstract social sciences.

3. Other people in Las Vegas who would qualify as aesthetic entrepreneurs might be Rehan Choudhry and the slew of local musicians, chefs, artists, and educators he has been putting alongside national acts at his annual ‘Life is Beautiful’ Festival since 2013, the craft brewers who have recently opened up shop in the Valley, and the people running the Vegas Roots Community Garden.