Speed, Motorcycles and the Archive (Personal Account‪)‬

I'VE BEEN THROUGH THE DESERT on a chrome-encrusted motorcycle that bore an odd resemblance to Elvis Presley and had a name almost as fat as the bike itself: the Harley Heritage Softail Classic. The desert was just outside Las Vegas, and the motorcycle was a rental, lined up as part of a trip I took with my husband to the Las Vegas Guggenheim to see a show that we had wanted to see for years: The Art of the Motorcycle, an exhibit of some of the world's most beautiful motorcycles (see Figure 10). Oh, you didn't know that there was a Guggenheim in Las Vegas? You didn't know that motorcycles belong in art galleries? Well, as it happens, the Guggenheim isn't there anymore, and there is a good possibility that the motorcycles shouldn't have been in the gallery anyhow. First, the closure of the Guggenheim: there were two Guggenheim galleries opened in Las Vegas's Venetian Hotel initially, the large gallery which held The Art of the Motorcycle and the smaller Guggenheim Hermitage Museum. The mandate of the larger gallery was to hold exhibits drawn from popular culture, while the Hermitage Museum would hold more traditional shows, like "Faberge Treasures from the Kremlin" or "A Century of Painting from Renoir to Rothko." Considering the location of these galleries, it seems strange indeed to think which of the two galleries survived the ruthless gaze of the Las Vegas cultural consumer.