If the world is becoming more bland, is Las Vegas the exception?

The world might be slowly losing its color, according to a study analyzing thousands of photographs that was published in the Science Museum Group Digital Lab, a consortium of science museums based in England.

The photographs analyzed were those of everyday household objects over a period of more than 200 years.

Starting around 1980, vivid reds and oranges were seen less frequently in the photos as the color gray took center stage.

The things that we buy or are sold to us through advertising campaigns appear to have traveled down a similar path. Iconic fast-food logos have, over time, become more streamlined and monochrome, as have many of their restaurants, compared with those in decades past.

It’s no secret that vehicles are also becoming less colorful. According to iSeeCars.com, a “car search engine,” according to its website, 80 percent of 2023 model-year vehicles were white, black, gray or silver. That’s a jump from just over 60 percent two decades earlier.

But as the stuff of everyday life seems to be embracing fewer shades, Las Vegas, the brightest spot on Earth visible from space, remains a carefully crafted mess of color and light.

Visitors landing at Harry Reid International Airport are welcomed with neon lights and flashing slot machines fresh off the tarmac.

Whether they choose to venture to the Strip’s Venetian canals or Roman fountains, grab a drink inside a giant chandelier or wander downtown for a taste of the local art scene, tourists can expect to be immersed in all of the color and dazzle Las Vegas has to offer.

“There’s plenty of places where you can go and gamble,” said Chuck Monn, chief creative officer for R&R Partners, an advertising and marketing agency headquartered in Las Vegas. But Las Vegas offers something different: “It’s a crazy dream that keeps on going, and you never really want to wake up.”

Monn said he believes that trends are like a swinging pendulum, with people chasing an aesthetic that’s a reaction to the one that came before. “And then it swings back,” he said.

Today, “we’re a more minimalist, austere aesthetic as a population and world. That’s the predominant theme of design right now,” Monn said, adding that he believes technology — which is designed to be simple, clean and modern — has a lot to do with this.

Both minimalist and maximalist aesthetics are difficult to “do right,” Monn said. “In a cluttered world, going towards minimalism, for a time, helped stand out against the clutter. But now the clutter has become minimalism.”

‘Most visually intense place in the entire world’

Izaac Zevalking, an artist who works under the pseudonym Recycled Propaganda and has a gallery in the Arts District by the same name, said that his world has never dulled. “Because I live here, and because of what I do, I live in a very colorful world,” he said.

His conceptual work tends to be more minimalist and based on singular visuals, he said. But both the artwork he creates from found objects and his gallery space boom with color and texture.

Las Vegas, Zevalking said, is “probably the most visually intense place in the entire world.”

Part of this is thanks to what Zevalking said he sees as a lack of regulation about what’s visually allowed. In Los Angeles, for instance, there are restrictions on where you can put a billboard versus a painted mural, he said. But here, “it’s still kind of the Wild West,” he said.

“In modern times, the acceptance of the Sphere was a no-brainer, right? And it’s one of the brightest structures in the whole world,” said Zevalking, who moved from England to Las Vegas in 2012.

Las Vegas adopts a more forward-facing mindset, rather than trying to preserve its history, Zevalking said. His own gallery lives in a building built in 1946, and he said there’s no special permission required to tear down a structure that old.

“That’s how Vegas fundamentally treats their history,” Zevalking said. “Out with the old, in with the new.” But, it’s this philosophy that continues to allow new, exciting visuals to crop up. Zevalking’s gallery space mimics the city, given that his one rule for artists is that there are no rules.

Zevalking said he’s curious about where people worried about the world’s apparent decline into gray spend their time. “Where are you hanging out?” he asked.

‘Designed by entertainers and mad people’

With Las Vegas’ sprawling art installations, unique dining experiences and glittering nightlife, Monn described the city as a “wonderful adult playground that you need to come visit from time to time to get yourself out of your everyday life.”

“It’s a place designed by entertainers and mad people who want to put joy and play into the world,” Monn said. The resorts themselves are moreso “cathedrals to the imagination” than just hotels. “Everyone has a different kind of take on it, but it’s all big. It’s all larger than life.”

Zevalking said he views the Strip as the world’s biggest open and free art gallery, something that really hit home for him when the Strip was quiet during the COVID-19 pandemic, a far cry from today’s hustle and bustle.

“Art is about the experience,” said Zevalking, who always has music playing at Recycled Propaganda, something he said is unusual in the traditional gallery setting. But, “Vegas is good at breaking the precedent,” he said. “We’re more visually ahead of the curve than other cities.”

While nothing in Las Vegas is the same, Monn said, everything is “a lot.” “That’s by design,” he said.

“That puts a mindset of anything’s possible here, anything can happen tonight,” Monn said. “A lot of people come here not necessarily having much of a plan. They just want to be amazed.”

Contact Estelle Atkinson at eatkinson@reviewjournal.com. Follow @estellelilym on X and @estelleatkinson.bsky.social on Bluesky.