At the beginning of the third millennium, Las Vegas has become a new model of consumer entertainment -- the total pleasure market in which everything is for sale. Hancock's superb photographic eye chronicles the pop-culture fantasy playground that is Las Vegas, a physical location as much as an idea, a place that deliberately blurs politics, money, art, religion, entertainment, sex, and anything else architects can imagine and marketers can sell. The range of Hancock's images is as diverse as the city itself: the town's neon-saturated nights; the glitzy, monumental hotel-palaces; the decaying buildings yielding to wrecking crews; the billboards that sell everything and convey unexpected truths; and a sampling of all that draws a world-wide audience seeking to be entertained. This book is ultimately about material and spiritual alchemy -- the transformation of fantasies into reality and the purification of consumption.

Virgil Hancock III