Byline: By danny hakim section: Section B; Column 0; Metropolitan Desk; Pg. 1 Length

PERSON: DAVID DAVIS (52%); MICHAEL MCMAHON (52%); JERRY YANG (94%)
GEOGRAPHIC: SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA, CA, USA (74%) CALIFORNIA, USA (79%) UNITED STATES (79%)
LOAD-DATE: August 3, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTOS: Jerry Yang, the chief executive of Yahoo. Many are questioning his leadership, but he says he is best suited to move the company forward. (PHOTOGRAPH BY TERRENCE MCCARTHY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES) (pg.TR1)

Jerry Yang, center, with the Google co-founders Larry Page, left, and Sergey Brin at the Allen & Company conference last month in Idaho. The rival companies have an ad partnership. (PHOTOGRAPH BY RICK WILKING/REUTERS) (pg.TR2) CHART: MARKET CAPITALIZATION in billions (Source: Bloomberg) (pg.TR2)

PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

523 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
August 3, 2008 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

New Looks
BYLINE: By ROB WALKER
SECTION: Section MM; Column 0; Magazine Desk; CONSUMED; Pg. 13
LENGTH: 761 words
KAWS

At 33, Brian Donnelly is enjoying a successful art career. Working out of a studio in Brooklyn, he has sold paintings to Pharrell Williams, the rapper and producer; Nigo, the designer-entrepreneur; and Takashi Murakami, the international art star, among others. He has also created a variety of products including toys, apparel and even pillows -- and indeed he has his own store, Original Fake, in Tokyo. He has also been widely known in the ''street art'' world for years; one of his early altered-phone-booth-ad posters recently traded hands on eBay for $22,000. One thing Donnelly had not done until lately, however, is forge a relationship with a dealer or art gallery. This wasn't because he shunned or had a problem with the traditional gallery system. He says it's just that ''nobody asked.''

But that has changed. Donnelly, who works under the name KAWS, has been taken on by the Gering & Lopez Gallery in New York, where he'll have a show this November. He will also exhibit a batch of paintings at Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin in Miami in September and will have another solo exhibition early next year at Honor Fraser in Los Angeles. Sandra Gering, of Gering & Lopez Gallery, had not heard of Donnelly before another artist she works with included him in a group show last summer, but she is clearly smitten with Donnelly's bright, clean, slightly off-kilter canvases that often riff on pop-culture figures like the Smurfs or the Simpsons. And she figures there's another market for his work. ''I think it needs to get out there in the art world,'' she says.

It seems odd that someone already making a good living as an artist is only now being introduced to ''the art world,'' but Donnelly's story may say something about the different ways creative work can acquire value these days. He studied painting and majored in illustration at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and during the 1990s he gained a certain underground notoriety for removing ads from Manhattan bus shelters and altering them -- often adding a slightly disturbing skull-like image, with X's for eyes -- and then putting them back. Visits to Japan brought him into contact with a subculture of hustling young creators blurring the lines between design, art and business, and in 1999 he began producing plastic, toylike versions of his characters in addition to collaborating on products with companies like the skateboard brand DC Shoes and the fashion line Comme des Garcons. He gradually built a clientele for his paintings on his own, and images of his work traveled widely online.

John Jay, executive creative director at the ad agency Wieden & Kennedy, remembers meeting Donnelly in Japan and thinking that he had somehow skipped a career step. ''But people don't always understand,'' Jay adds, ''you don't have to have a gallery to sell to international stars anymore.'' Edward Winkleman, owner of the Winkleman Gallery in New York, offers a slightly different take. At edwardwinkleman.blogspot.com, he offers thoughtful observations and practical advice about overprotective gallerists, studio-visit strategies and the like. While the Internet is helping a growing number of artists get noticed, he says, most upstart artists still prefer to rely on a gallerist to connect with appropriate consumers (collectors). And Donnelly's reputation-building and connection-making is pretty much what Winkleman advises many of his readers to do; he just did it in a different context -- one in which selling your creativity is part of the job.

So why bother with galleries at all? Winkleman notes that it remains much harder for artists who operate outside the art-world structure to end up in museum collections, which is still seen as ''the quintessential validation'' by many. And surely a new market is part of the equation. Gering has been introducing Donnelly's work to her clients since last summer, and ''we've sold every painting we've brought into the gallery,'' she says. The November show will consist of new sculptures (including 33 bronzed, painted renditions of his own head) and paintings; the works will be priced at $25,000 and up.

Donnelly, who is surprisingly low-key and humble in person, adds a different point about wanting his work in a gallery: hardly anyone has seen his privately sold paintings up close. Even the work that shows up on the Internet, he says, ends up looking as if it could have been executed on a computer. ''People really have no idea what they're looking at,'' he says. ''I want them to be able to stand in front of the work.''
URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: PAINTING (90%); ART & ARTISTS (90%); ARTISTS & PERFORMERS (89%); VISUAL & PERFORMING ARTS (78%); HUMANITIES & SOCIAL SCIENCE (78%); RAP MUSIC (78%); MUSEUMS & GALLERIES (78%); VISUAL ARTS (78%); ART DEALERS (78%); HIP HOP CULTURE (78%); FASHION & APPAREL (77%); MARKETING & ADVERTISING AGENCIES (75%); MARKETING & ADVERTISING (70%)
GEOGRAPHIC: NEW YORK, NY, USA (90%); TOKYO, JAPAN (72%) NEW YORK, USA (90%); CALIFORNIA, USA (78%) UNITED STATES (90%); JAPAN (72%)
LOAD-DATE: August 3, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: DRAWING (DRAWING BY PETER ARKLE)
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

524 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
August 3, 2008 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

So What if the Chips Are Down?
BYLINE: By JULIE CRESWELL
SECTION: Section BU; Column 0; Money and Business/Financial Desk; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 2990 words
DATELINE: Las Vegas
STEVE WYNN casually plops a 231-carat, plum-size, pear-shaped diamond into my greedy little paw. Seated in his office in the Wynn casino resort here, and flanked by two German shepherds, he won't tell me how much he paid for his rock.

But he quickly points out that it's better than a 218-carat diamond that the godfather of Chinese gambling, Stanley Ho, displays in one of his casinos in Macao.

''I turned that diamond down,'' Mr. Wynn allows, before asking if I've toyed with his bauble long enough and prying it from my hands.

The give and the take. The grand gesture. The over-the-top glitz. The invocation of magic in a brew of 24/7 gambling, resort excess, ultrahigh-end shopping, fine dining and routine pampering. These are all part and parcel of a toolkit toted around for decades by the man credited with changing the landscape of the Strip and bringing a semblance of class to Sin City.

Later this year, Mr. Wynn, 66, will open his latest project: the $2.3 billion Encore casino resort, a fantasy land featuring 2,034 luxury suites, a glass-encased casino overlooking several pools, and penthouse baccarat tables for high rollers.

The Encore is also an outsize gamble by a man who has made a lucrative, freewheeling career out of such moves, and it comes just as an economic malaise that has been seeping across the country is starting to slam the gambling industry.

Like other businesses dependent on consumers and consumption to make a fast buck, the gambling trade looks particularly vulnerable.

While revelers still fill the streets here and can be found even on a hot summer afternoon pulling slot machine levers, conventioneers are spending much less time in the city and vacationers are shelling out less on restaurants, nightclubs and gambling than they did last year.

''The recession we're seeing in the United States is affecting Las Vegas more this time around than in any previous cycle,'' says Dennis I. Forst, a gambling analyst at KeyBanc Capital Markets.

Nervous investors have already pummeled casino stocks. The share price of the largest publicly traded casino company, Las Vegas Sands, headed by Sheldon Adelson, has plunged almost 70 percent from its 52-week high. The stock of another big company, MGM Mirage (which, along with its majority shareholder, Kirk Kerkorian, bought Mr. Wynn's old company eight years ago), has fallen by almost exactly the same amount.

Las Vegas Sands and MGM Mirage are also hobbled by the fact that they are undertaking huge and expensive hotel casino developments in China and Las Vegas, respectively, that have investors worried about rising debt levels on their balance sheets.

MGM, for example, has its $9.2 billion CityCenter development under way here. It boasts as many as 8,000 construction workers erecting seven high-rise buildings on 76 acres. Projected to be completed late next year, CityCenter is to be a densely organized ''city within a city'' with a casino, luxury hotel properties, numerous luxury retailers and about 2,650 condominium residences -- yet another megaproject in a town that is already bursting at the seams and has led the nation's housing downturn.

On Friday, Boyd Gaming, which owns several middle-market casinos here and co-owns the more upscale Borgata in Atlantic City, said it was delaying construction of a partially built, multibillion-dollar casino on the Strip. The Boyd development is a sprawling endeavor undertaken in partnership with the Morgans Hotel Group. Boyd cited the credit crisis and the ''challenging economic conditions'' as reasons for the delay. Boyd's stock is down 73 percent over the last year.

But even smaller companies operating in Atlantic City and elsewhere are hurting: shares of Pinnacle Entertainment are down 62 percent over the last year, Riviera Holdings is down 73 percent and Trump Entertainment Resorts is off 83 percent.

Although the stock of Mr. Wynn's company, Wynn Resorts, has fallen 45 percent, it is faring much better than those of his rivals. And despite the bleak times facing Las Vegas, Mr. Wynn has a rather devil-may-care demeanor when asked about the economy.

''What am I doing opening one of these places in a bad economy?'' he asks, leaning forward in his chair. He answers his own question by strumming his lips like a banjo, making a noise that one of his seven grandchildren might make if they were confused, before laughing uproariously.

Joking aside, Mr. Wynn, one of the most magnetic and polarizing figures in the gambling industry, has always thrown himself into his ventures with passion and purpose. And even when embellishing his thoughts with Hollywood-like bravado, he is a wily, singular competitor who, after making hundreds of millions of dollars here, rolled the dice again. He now owns stock valued at about $2.3 billion.

''You saw all of these other people come out to Las Vegas and say, 'We'll just knock off a fully integrated destination resort. Nothing to it; I've done other businesses,' '' he says, snapping his fingers blithely. Then he brings his voice down to a stage whisper worthy of Dirty Harry. ''Uh, not so fast, Rodriguez. I don't think so.''

ASKED whether Las Vegas, in its pell-mell rush to court the more recession-resistant luxury market, could be building too many luxury properties like CityCenter, Mr. Wynn stops the conversation cold.

''Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Who said that is the luxury market?'' he asks, his voice rising. ''The luxury market in Las Vegas is Bellagio and Wynn. Period. You can look at the average room rate. We're in one category, and they're a notch down.''

''Everybody says they're fancy and beautiful, but the question is, who is delivering five-star service?'' he adds.

At a cost of $2.7 billion, the Wynn, which opened in 2005, is all about opulent grandeur. It has 2,716 rooms, 18 restaurants, a 45-foot waterfall cascading down a massive artificial mountain, and a shopping promenade featuring upscale brands like Chanel, Dior and Louis Vuitton as well as a Ferrari and Maserati dealership. (The company says the site sells 70 Maseratis each year.)

Nearly everything -- from the undulating parasols overlooking a bar to the chandeliers and the chairs -- is designed especially for the hotel, says Roger Thomas, who has created the interior of many of Mr. Wynn's hotels.

''I don't even like color out of a box,'' Mr. Thomas says. So he customized the wall colors. When he was told he couldn't put chandeliers over the gambling tables because they would block security cameras, he figured out a way to fit cameras inside the chandeliers.

For his part, Mr. Wynn may be sanguine about the challenges facing Las Vegas and the economic downturn looming over the town because he has faced down naysayers and financial challenges before.

When he opened the Mirage in 1989, the country's economy was struggling and critics predicted he would lose his shirt. Instead, the Mirage, with white tigers, a shark tank and an erupting volcano, became an instant tourist draw and a financial success.

Some Wall Street analysts say Mr. Wynn is in the catbird seat because his company's debt hasn't mounted as his rivals' has, and because his focus on the jet set has so far insulated his bottom line.

''Unlike Sands and MGM, investors aren't really that concerned about Wynn's balance sheet,'' says Bill Lerner, an equity analyst at Deutsche Bank. Wynn Resorts doesn't need to raise money to finish current projects in Las Vegas or China, he says, adding that the company is ''underleveraged, relatively speaking.'' Unlike MGM and Sands, Wynn Resorts doesn't have ''big development pipelines'' in the works, he says.

What does worry investors about Wynn Resorts, Mr. Lerner says, is the concern ''that the high-end consumer may ultimately crack,'' he says. ''We don't see much evidence of that yet.''

Still, the numbers might be troubling. Wynn Resorts recently reported a steep drop in net casino revenue in Las Vegas, while revenue per available room, a much-watched gauge, slipped 3 percent. Those results were offset by huge casino revenue gains in Macao, where Mr. Wynn expects to open his second casino hotel, Encore at Wynn Macau, in early 2010.

''Sure, I wish it was a boom time. You like to open up when everybody is ripping and roaring,'' says Mr. Wynn, speaking of the Encore's Las Vegas opening later this year. But, he adds, his properties are meant to last for decades. ''Who cares if the opening is slow?''

BEFORE he opens Encore, Mr. Wynn is still fussing over details at the flagship hotel. He fumes at a Wynn Resorts ad in a local newspaper because it's not the right shade of red. ''Tell them we won't pay for it,'' he snarls at an employee.

In a meeting with his chief architect, DeRuyter Butler, he scrutinizes a prototype of a fence he wants to build around the Wynn Resorts property to keep gawkers from sitting on the grass or, even worse, changing babies' diapers there (which they've been know to do, he says).

And the wind: It's whistling through the elevators in his lobby and driving him nuts. Alternating between pounding his fist on the desk and grumbling under his breath, Mr. Wynn makes his point: how can we be a top-notch hotel and have our guests being blown all over the place?

He doesn't brook the notion that he might be a micromanager, because all the little things add up when it comes to serving and pleasing his customers. ''Attention to detail? This is what we do,'' he says, crediting his fellow ''dreamers and schemers'' who work with him for sharing his vision and corporate culture -- most notably his wife, Elaine, to whom he's been married for most of the last 45 years. (They briefly divorced but remarried.) Among her duties is overseeing special events for the company.

Mr. Wynn leans on Elaine figuratively and literally, often throwing an arm around her as she guides him through the property; a degenerative eye disease is causing him to go progressively blind.

''What I've realized in the years that I've been married to him is that if you don't share his life, you get left behind,'' says Ms. Wynn, who is a member of the Wynn Resorts board. ''A guy like Steve doesn't mellow out. He still has his explosions. But they pass quickly.''

''Steve is an Aquarius; his feet are off the ground,'' she says. ''The thrill for him is still creating. He loves the design element of this, and he is quite brilliant at inspiring the staff.''

MR. WYNN first came to Las Vegas as a young boy with his father, Mike Wynn, an East Coast bingo parlor operator and a compulsive gambler. After his father died, Mr. Wynn and his new bride, Elaine Pascal, a former Miss Miami Beach, took over the bingo business. Steve called out the numbers; Elaine counted the cash.

The Wynns eventually made their way to Las Vegas, where, in 1967, Mr. Wynn bought a 3 percent stake in the Frontier casino. Three months later, several partners were accused of being fronts for a group of Detroit mobsters. Mr. Wynn was cleared of any mob connections in the investigation, which resulted in some convictions of partners and led to the sale of the Frontier to Howard Hughes.

With the help of his mentor, E. Parry Thomas (Roger Thomas's father), Mr. Wynn got a second chance. Mr. Thomas, who headed the only bank willing to lend money to casinos at the time, backed Mr. Wynn in some early land deals and set him up in a liquor distributorship. Mr. Thomas became known as a main conduit for the Teamster pension fund money that was pumped into the city during the Jimmy Hoffa era.

Later, again with Mr. Thomas's counsel, Mr. Wynn started accumulating stock in the publicly traded company Golden Nugget, owner of what was then a rundown casino in downtown Las Vegas. Over time, he staged a takeover of the company, eventually renovating and expanding the casino. His burgeoning profile subjected him to repeated and routine regulatory investigations for possible ties to organized crime, all of which, Mr. Wynn is quick to point out, found him to be squeaky clean.

He later built a Golden Nugget in Atlantic City, before selling that and turning his focus to Las Vegas to build the Mirage. The Mirage's popularity ignited a new boom here, and Mr. Wynn followed up with the Treasure Island.

His piece de resistance was the Bellagio, a $1.6 billion Italianate resort that opened in 1998. It featured luxury retailers, high-end restaurants and a gallery of art collected by Mr. Wynn. It became the linchpin of Mirage Resorts, a publicly traded company with Mr. Wynn at the helm.

But by early 2000, Mirage's stock was getting clobbered. Investors were alarmed at ballooning costs, an expensive development on the Gulf Coast and Mr. Wynn's sometimes odd behavior, which included serenading Wall Street analysts with show tunes.

MGM Grand made a bid for Mirage -- whether it was a hostile or friendly overture has been a point of contention between the two sides -- eventually agreeing to buy the company for $4.4 billion and to assume about $2 billion of Mirage debt.

Mr. Wynn was 58 at the time, and he walked away from the deal with about $500 million. He could have retired and lived comfortably off of his winnings, but, ever the entrepreneur, he began staging his comeback.

Even before the Mirage-MGM sale closed, Mr. Wynn had agreed to buy the old Desert Inn, a beaten-down Strip property, for $270 million. He spent a further $70 million or so snapping up nearby homes so that he could create a golf course. Then he snared a coveted casino license in Macao.

When Wynn Resorts went public in 2002, Mr. Wynn says, he had about $250 million invested in the company. Since then, he has received about $300 million in distributions from his 24 percent stake, which is currently worth about $2.3 billion.

Taking some not-so-subtle jabs at his competitors, he defends his current projects as being well within his comfort zone. ''We didn't overreach. We're not building 12 hotels at once,'' he states, his voice again rising. ''I think we've bitten off something we can chew. How it shakes out, only time will tell.''

THESE days, there are any number of casinos here offering deluxe rooms, restaurants with name-brand chefs, Rodeo Drive-equivalent shopping, steakhouses, booming nightclubs and, of course, the latest must-have: an all-day pool club party with a D.J.

''At this point, everyone has essentially the same product,'' says Anthony Curtis, who publishes the Las Vegas Advisor, a newsletter. ''So the trick is finding a way to differentiate yourself.''

Mr. Curtis is sitting on a lounge chair at the edge of the ''Brazilian Pool'' at the Rio casino hotel. Exotic dancers from the Sapphire Gentlemen's Club play topless volleyball in the pool with men who pay a $30 cover charge ($10 for women). Everybody needs a gimmick, concludes Mr. Curtis.

Indeed, Las Vegas may need all the gimmicks it can find.

The number of visitors through May was flat compared with last year, but hotels and casinos are offering discounts on room rates to attract tourists. Analysts at Citigroup estimate that room rates fell 12.4 percent in the second quarter and 18.4 percent in the early part of the third quarter, compared with the same periods last year.

Still, those visitors are gambling less; wagering revenues on the Strip are down 5.6 percent this year through May, according to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.

Operators here say they're seeing a significant difference between the low- and middle-end casinos and those catering to wealthier consumers. MGM, which owns the high-end Mirage and Bellagio as well as casinos like Excalibur and Circus Circus, which cater to less affluent travelers, says its overall revenue per room on the Strip fell 4 percent in the first quarter.

''Our lower-end properties were down much lower,'' says James J. Murren, MGM's president and chief operating officer. ''They were 5 percent to 12 percent below a year ago.''

Several projects here, meanwhile, face uncertain futures as they struggle to secure financing in one of the worst credit crises in decades. Deutsche Bank, for instance, is foreclosing on the $3.5 billion Cosmopolitan casino after the New York developer Ian Bruce Eichner defaulted on a $760 million loan.

MGM has a joint venture to build CityCenter with Dubai World, the Middle Eastern investment fund, which put $2.7 billion into the project. They're now trying to raise a further $3 billion. Analysts and investors say they're worried about MGM's unsold condominiums because the condo market has been hit particularly hard in Las Vegas.

Amid such uncertainty, the city's push over the last two decades to diversify is also providing cause for worry. About 59 percent of the Strip's revenue now comes from nongambling activities like restaurants, hotels and leases on retail space, compared with 42 percent in 1990, says William Eadington, director of the Institute for the Study of Gambling and Commercial Gaming at the University of Nevada, Reno.

That's one reason the big gambling companies are feeling this economic downturn more than they have in the past. ''What we're seeing is discretionary spending take a hit,'' Mr. Eadington says. ''People may still come to Vegas, but they don't have to spend $300 a plate on a dinner or hotel room.''

With the Encore opening about five months away, Mr. Wynn continues to wave off fears of an economic downturn. Instead, he launches into a long conversation about politics and foreign affairs, having just returned from a weekend at the secretive Bohemian Grove gathering in California. There, he explains, he interacted with such political heavyweights as George P. Shultz, Henry A. Kissinger and Colin L. Powell.

When asked where he fit in, exactly, with that crowd, the showman, ever self-aware, spreads his hands and laughs.

''Me?'' he asks, thumping his chest. ''I'm over here hustling craps!''