The Inauthenticity of Santa Fe and Las Vegas, Essay Example

In the 1998 article Dialectical Utopias, Dave Hickey compares and contrasts the inauthenticity of Santa Fe and Las Vegas.  While it is clear that he prefers the inauthentic honesty of Las Vegas to the false “legitimacy” of Santa Fe, Hickey dissects both cities and expresses the reasons for his preference.  Even though the two cities have some superficial factors in common, Santa Fe and Las Vegas are very different from one another. The values of pretending to be spiritual cause Santa Fe to waste something much more precious than money.

Even though their cultures are very different, Las Vegas and Santa Fe have many superficial similarities.  Both cities are popular resorts and portrayed as “utopias.”  They are attractive to tourists, but for very different reasons.  Santa Fe and Las Vegas are both located in the desert, and exhibit an exterior architecture which is both “hard” and “reflective.”  Surveillance is heavy in both cities, and inhabitants are closely monitored.  People flock to both cities to lose themselves for different reasons.  In fact, Hickey reports that it is very easy to become physically lost and disoriented in both Santa Fe and Las Vegas.

Despite these surface similarities, the differences between the two cities are all too obvious. While both desert cities have a “hard” and “reflective” architecture, in Santa Fe, everything is designed to be the same. Hickey states that Santa Fe “connote[s] strength and virtue in the iconography of Modernism” (2). There is no variation in the design of Santa Fe. True creativity is suppressed, encouraging a solidarity. In Las Vegas, diversity is ornate and almost confrontational.  Hickey states that “in Santa Fe we are all one in our elevated specialness. In Vegas we are different but equal” (4). This statement falls back to the Santa Fe’s elitism expressed by Hickey. People in Santa Fe prize spirituality and abstinence from desire, while people in Las Vegas embrace their desires completely. Las Vegas is honest about its baser urges, while Santa Fe’s presentation of purity is all for show.

In both cities, people have a propensity for becoming lost and losing valuable commodities. People in Santa Fe can become physically lost quite easily because there are no signs for directions and everything looks the same. People in Las Vegas will become lost because there are too many signs and everything is so different that it all becomes a distraction.  Santa Fe’s embraces a culture of leisure and fake antiquity.  Time just passes. In Las Vegas, nothing is permanent because newness is valued and everything is continuously replaced. The sense of loss brings Hickey to the main point of his argument. In Las Vegas, people waste their money, but in Santa Fe, they waste their time (Hickey 5).  Money can always be replenished, but time cannot.

Perhaps because the elite class in Santa Fe is comprised of professionals, such as dentists, that they feel that their time is to be spent in a leisure manner?  Hickey feels that instead of enjoying leisure, time is merely passing and is therefore wasted.  With Las Vegas, there is never time for inactivity and there is always something to do in the form of active entertainment.  Even if a person spends all of their money gambling or on other entertainments, the only thing that is truly lost is money.

On the surface, it may seem as though Hickey is merely expressing his resentment towards an elitist class of pseudointellectuals, which he feels comprises Santa Fe.  However, Hickey readily acknowledges that neither cities are authentic.  But unlike Las Vegas, which is honest about its glittery façade, Santa Fe attempts to conceal its inauthenticity by pretending to be more spiritual than it is.  As a result, true spirituality is lost.  By embracing the present moment in Las Vegas, people have a better chance of achieving real spirituality by immersing themselves in a human experience.

Works Cited

Hickey, Dave, “Dialectical Utopias,” Harvard Design Magazine, 1998, No. 4, pp. 1-5.