At the Guggenheim Las Vegas, a small-displacement Derbi (red) and Honda are displayed. Frank Gehry's polished aluminum roadway creates an eerie effect.

One of the more compelling presentations that day had been given by Charles Falco, Curatorial Advisor to the Guggenheim's Art of the Motorcycle show. For those not already aware of Las Vegas' newest attraction, he gave a fine précis of the recently opened Guggenheim Las Vegas, which joins branches in New York, Berlin, Vienna and Bilbao. Since the Art of the Motorcycle exhibition opened at the New York Guggenheim it has traveled to Chicago and Bilbao. It has also been the most heavily attended and largest grossing art exhibition since its 1998 opening.

The Guggenheim Las Vegas and its sister museum, the Guggenheim Hermitage, a joint venture between the Guggenheim and the Hermitage in St. Petersberg Russia, were built inside Sheldon Adelson's Venetian at a cost of thirty million dollars. Designed by Dutchman, Rem Koolhaas as part of the Venetian, the 68,000 square foot GLV is an amazing space featuring seventy-foot doors and a bridge crane spanning the width of the six-story space allowing for the handling of any piece of art. It is here that architect Frank Gehry has designed an amazing setting for The Art of the Motorcycle. Gehry's trademark curved metal surfaces appear as a polished roadway with the bikes placed on it. He has also done three-story backdrops of white bent walls with jagged edges suggesting the machines are emerging from a hatched egg. Other areas have white pedestals with the bikes floating in soaring spaces against black backdrops and one exhibit hall had multi-story metal mesh curtains creating the impression of entering a king's court, with the bikes lining the aisle way in the place of knights. While not drawing attention away from the motorcycles, Koolhaas and Gehry's architecture demands attention when you are within it.

The Art of the Motorcycle at the Guggenheim Las Vegas included this grouping. Ducati (left) and Parilla singles dominate the foreground while an NSU streamliner floats in the rear.

The exhibit features the best of the best from the motorcycle's beginnings before the turn of the twentieth century. From the first crude experiments, progress is shown to the 1930s by which time motorcycles had taken the form we are familiar with today. All the icons are on display, the BMW R-32, the Brough Superior, Edward Turner's original Triumph Speed Twin and BMW's fish-tailed streamliner that Ernest Henne rode to a world speed record in 1937. Postwar era designs, the Norton Manx, Matchless G-50, Triumph Bonneville and BSA Gold Star remind us of how the British dominated the sporting bike market then. A perfectly restored Honda 750 Four shows us in retrospect how its fit and finish, self-starter, and powerful, vibration-free and leak-free four-cylinder engine spelled the death knell for the British motorcycle industry. But for a chauvinistic U.S. Congress that passed protectionist legislation, it might well have done the same to Harley-Davidson, the last American manufacturer standing at the time. Ducatisti were happy to see their favorites as well - the Diana, the collectible 750 SS and the Monster fit seamlessly into Gehry's installation. The museum was packed and rightly so. This is an exhibit that anyone with the slightest interest in things mechanical will find fascinating. It will run for eight months. Whatever follows it will be worth seeing just to be inside one of the great public spaces among U.S. museums.

For those who have not been to Las Vegas in many years, it is no longer just a neon gridiron of greasy, cheap buffets and gambling. The food, accommodations and attractions are truly world-class, just like the Ducatis that made the city home for a weekend in October.

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