Making Money off High Costs

By CALVIN TRILLIN

By chance, I was an overnight guest at the Bellagio the week Steve Wynn's $1.6 billion Las Vegas hotel with the $300 million art collection opened, and I have one question that was left unanswered even by the extensive coverage in TIME: Why didn't Wynn spend more of the $300 million on the art in my room? After careful inspection of all the pictures on the walls of our standard double, my wife and I arrived at a ballpark estimate of $83 for the lot.

That figure was based partly on the market in the sort of "genuine, one-of-a-kind oil paintings" peddled on Sundays in art sales at suburban motels, a market that seems to have held steady at $39.95. The pictures in our room appeared to be reproductions of motel oils, which is why our $83 estimate was mostly for the frames.

I want to make it clear that when my wife and I are invited out we rarely--I won't say never--try to estimate the cost of the art and furnishings. There is no truth to that story about a piece of vitello tonnato sliding onto the table at a rather posh New York dinner party when my wife tilted her plate to get a look at the maker's mark on the bottom. She's not like that at all.

What brings out what the psychologists call pricing behavior even in my wife is the Las Vegas custom of emphasizing how much any new hotel costs--a custom I think of as conspicuous capitalization. If a hotel boasts about costing $1.6 billion, it's no wonder that my wife--who, like many people of royal birth brought up in middle-class American families through mix-ups at the hospital, prefers down pillows--might be inclined to bounce her fist off a hard rubber pillow and comment, "The money must be somewhere else."

And it's no wonder that I might be inclined to grumble more than I ordinarily might about small charges. My irritation at being asked at the Bellagio's business center how I wished to pay for an incoming fax was based partly, I'll admit, on the fact that I had no idea where the fax came from. (It was in a sealed envelope.) Was I about to pay for gloriously good news from my agent or for another screed from that persistent gentleman who is always writing to accuse me of showing insufficient respect to the Speaker of the House? But I also found myself irritated that the man who spent $1.6 billion for a hotel was intending to recoup that investment partly by charging me $2 a page for an incoming fax.

The answer to my question about the art in my room, I suppose, is that it made sense for Wynn to spend the entire $300 million on what he stashed in a two-room gallery in the lobby not simply because he can charge ten bucks a shot for admission but because it gives the rubes the opportunity to say, "I hear he's got $300 million tied up in those two rooms." If you use conspicuous capitalization as your principal marketing tool, the real point of a $300 million art collection is that it costs $300 million. The occasional visitor who's provoked into making smart-aleck remarks about the pillows, like the occasional visitor who has a run of luck on the slots, can be charged off to the cost of doing business.