A look down The Strip on New Year’s Eve of 2000 revealed the triumph of Las Vegas. With its long line of multi-colored casinos that light the night sky, it is the largest private investment in public art anywhere. It produces no tangible goods of any significance, yet generates billions of dollars in profits each year. Las Vegas had become the first city of the 21st century where desire met capital, instinct replaced restraint and the future of American society took a form that had been inconceivable even a decade before.

Since 1973, Las Vegas has been born anew. Its transformation—from a gambling city to a tourist attraction to the Entertainment Capital of the World—occurred so quickly that only Wall Street and the gossip columnists could keep pace. The old model of the “sinful city” for buttoned-down culture has been forever replaced with a new Las Vegas that both anticipates and reflects desire, a peculiar formula that makes Las Vegas all things to all people.

In the 1990s, Las Vegas came into its own as a city on par with other American metropolises in its significance, while still generating its livelihood differently than any other on earth. The presence of gifted entrepreneurs who anticipated the core of American longings turned the city into a world center of pleasure. Kirk Kerkorian, the visionary behind the first and the current MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, led this transformation. A self-made man who came up the hard way, Mr. Kerkorian moved into gambling first as a player, known as the “Perry Como of the craps table” for the style with which he won and lost, and then as an owner with the purchase of a small piece of the Dunes Hotel in 1955.