New museum on the Strip immerses visitors in wonders of nature

Amid the roar of an international auto race, a museum on the Strip is promising tranquility.

Arte Museum, an experience to tantalize all five senses, opens Friday at 63, on the southwest corner of Harmon Avenue and Las Vegas Boulevard. Tickets for the two-story, 30,000-square-foot attraction start at $28 and are on sale at lasvegas.artemuseum.com.

The exhibition evokes scenes of nature, including towering waterfalls, rolling beaches, camellia flowers, the splash of ocean waves, statuesque forests and twinkling star fields.

This “reinterpretation” of the great outdoors is the creation of the South Korean digital design company d’strict, which operates five such museums in Asia and has drawn more than 6 million visitors. The Las Vegas project is the company’s first in the Western Hemisphere.

As with other museums in this class, d’strict was lured to Las Vegas by its robust tourism business. CEO Sean Lee tracked the figures from August 2022 to this past July: some 40 million tourists. That mass of humanity would seem ripe for sensory exploration.

“This kind of location-based entertainment, such as Arte Museum, cannot rotate content so frequently,” Lee said in an online interview last week. “So, we are targeting tourists with the main features of our museum.”

Arte Museum opened its first attraction on Jeju Island, the largest islands and biggest tourism market in South Korea.

Lee’s company is committed to the Strip venue, with a lease running through 2032. Arte Museum operates in the same neighborhood as the similarly styled Immersive Van Gogh, just to the south in the Shoppes at Crystals.

“Many U.S. citizens are accustomed to the representation of these masterpieces,” Lee said. “But we are mainly representing some of the components of nature in the virtual environment.”

The museum’s Garden exhibit features a “Light of Las Vegas” zone, custom-designed for the Strip venue, that focuses on nightlife images and Nevada’s canyon landscapes. A “Light of Masterpieces” zone, meanwhile, invokes artists such as Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas and Gustav Klimt.

Described as an all-encompassing experience, Arte Museum takes guests from our city’s streets to the wilderness and back.

“We have found people have enjoyed this kind of virtual nature a lot. They enjoyed taking photos and sharing that on Instagram or TikTok,” Lee said. “We have been working in this industry over 14 years. So, we feel the quality of the produced content and experience will satisfy visitors to the Las Vegas museum.”

John Katsilometes’ column runs daily in the A section. His “PodKats!” podcast can be found at reviewjournal.com/podcasts. Contact him at jkatsilometes@reviewjournal.com. Follow @johnnykats on X, @JohnnyKats1 on Instagram.