Carpet at Slots o' Fun
In no other establishment on the planet is there such base human misery than in a casino. You can almost feel it on your skin. Naw, I’m kidding. I love gambling! But as if to bookend the casino’s showy glitz, the richly festooned carpet underfoot dazzles in its own arty universe, a garish call to arms for the gambling masses.
No one knows casino carpets better than Professor David G. Schwartz. He’s an esteemed historian, author and professor at the UNLV, and curator of the website ‘The Die is Cast‘. Schwartz has spent years visiting casinos and (mostly illegally) snapping photos of their carpets. After such a time he’s built an amazing stockpile of various carpet patterns from casinos all over the country. All the photos collected here are his but I spotlight them not only because they’re inherently beautiful but because Schwartz has made it his quest, his driving force, his obsession, to see, shoot and bring them all to the light of day.
Casino carpetry (my term) is an art form very few people appreciate, most of their attention of course being on their shirts and how fast they’re losing them. But as it’s taken for granted so is it true as any other art form, though tawdry and blatantly tripped out.
From Schwartz’s website:
Casino carpet is known as an exercise in deliberate bad taste that somehow encourages people to gamble…
My academic work on casinos has been an attempt to answer the question of how you get people to spend hours in smoke-filled, garishly-decorated places, losing money–and liking it.
It’s probably not a good idea too look closely at these – their well-trodden nature hasn’t been kind to all of them, but look lightly, squint and collect it in your subconscious, for the next time you see this wonderwheel, you may be on your trip to the poor house
Click on the images for a slightly larger version.
Showboat
Binion's Horseshoe
Madalay Bay
Harrah's Las Vegas
Jim Kelly's Nugget
Golden Nugget
The Las Vegas Club
Casino Magic Bay, St. Louis
Circus Circus
Peppermill
Trump Plaza
Ceasar's Palace
Mont Bleu, Tahoe
Sands
MGM Grand
New York, New York
Monte Carlo
Mirage
Please visit Prof. Schwartz’s website for his writing, to buy his books and see hundreds more carpet patterns from casinos across the country, from Indian to gangster to quaint to lakeside.
