Hotel Art

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In 2016, the world's largest budget hotel chain, Super 8, decided to put on an art show.

If you're an art aficionado, this is the place to be.

Miami, an art baseline.

But this year, something different, a new exhibition.

This collection called When the Art Comes Down, curated by Super 8.

Yes, that's Super 8, proving everything old is new again.

Super 8 wanted to get rid of the art that had been in its motel rooms since the chain was founded in 1974.

Whatever you imagine when you imagine quintessentially kitschy hotel art, a deer by a babbling brook near a lamplit cottage, a Bob Ross paint by numbers special, powdery winterscapes of quaint villages, a velvet painting, that's the kind of stuff that was on the walls of the Super 8s.

Rather than just throw it out, Super 8 gave the paintings away at one event at Art Basil in Miami, which ended up on the Today Show in the news clip you just heard, and another at a gallery space in New York, which was hosted by the comedian Amy Sedaris.

Sedaris named all the paintings, and she told Jimmy Fallon about it on the Tonight Show.

You just had an art show.

That's very exciting.

Yeah, Super 8 Hotels have gotten rid of all their old art.

They're bringing in new art.

They're bringing in a new art.

Which is going to be city-specific.

So like, let's say you're in San Francisco, you don't remember where you are, and you wake up and you'll see a painting of the Golden Gate Bridge or the arch in St.

Louis.

You got to name them.

I sure did.

It was really hard.

Do you remember what you named this one?

Valon is showing Sedaris a washed-out painting of three spindly trees, birches, maybe, that are emerging from a foreground of oversized, slightly impressionistic tulips and are standing in front of a psychedelic pastel sky.

This one, I don't remember, but let's call it early menopause.

We all know what we're done.

All of this was meant to bring attention to Super 8's new look.

They had gotten rid of all the old art for a reason, to upgrade it, to signal that the age of Kitsch Hotel art was officially over and that something new had taken its place.

When we decided to do an episode about hotel art, we thought we would be doing an episode about, well, hotel art.

Exactly the sort of ugly, shoddy, cheap paintings that used to hang in Super 8s.

But it turns out that's an outdated understanding.

Sure, you still regularly come across bizarre paintings in hotels, collages that match the carpet.

But the Super 8s move away from kitsch is part of a decades-long trend on hotels' part, hotels of all price points, to reclaim hotel art, to transform it from something unconsidered and embarrassing into a selling point.

A sign of sophistication and authenticity, an Instagram photo op, a communication to its customers about the kind of people they are and the kind of hotel they're staying at, or at the very least, evidence that they aren't desperately behind the times.

Hotel art, if you can believe it, has become a signifier of good taste.

This is Decodering, a show about cracking cultural mysteries.

I'm Slate's TV critic Willa Paskin.

Every month we take a cultural question, habit, or idea, crack it open, and try to figure out what it means and why it matters.

What happened to hotel art?

Hotel art is a subset of commercial art, which exists all around us, in all of the places that need and want art, but that are not museums or galleries.

Places like doctors' offices and dental clinics, restaurants and workspaces, hospitals and airports.

Places for art, but not about art.

Economically and aesthetically, this kind of work is often distinct from the work of artists who show at galleries and art fairs, but you might be surprised at the overlap, particularly in high-end hotels, which increasingly compete with each other to have the most ambitious art programs.

At the Bellagio in Las Vegas, which was opened by the art collector and hotelier Steve Wynn, a $10 million glass sculpture by Dale Chihuli blooms out of the lobby's ceiling.

The W Hotel in South Beach has a collection that includes work by Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Julian Schnabel.

High-end hotels commission original work all the time, sometimes from big-name contemporary artists, and even non-luxury hotels boast site-specific pieces in their lobbies, like a mural of a taxicab made out of pencil stubs or a 30-foot installation featuring the faces of local residents.

Hotel design in general has become so intentional, so stylized, that it's been lampooned on Portlandia.

Here's a sketch called The Deuce in which Fred Armison plays a hotel clerk.

It teases a certain kind of overdone hipster hotel where no singular piece of art is bad, but the whole thing reeks of trying too hard.

Well, enjoy your room.

The sink is really weird.

It's going to look like there's no faucet.

But whenever you feel the need to brush your teeth or whatever, don't worry about it.

It will happen.

And then each room comes with a turntable.

It's complimentary.

In order to understand how we got here, to a place where hotels are jockeying to distinguish themselves with their art, you need to understand how the modern hotel came to be.

The hotel, as we know it, first appeared in America in the 1790s.

At the time, inns and taverns were the norm, places that often housed travelers as a way to procure a liquor license.

They were bars with beds, basically.

By contrast, these new hotels wanted wanted to emphasize their elegance and luxury, their safety.

Their architecture was imposing and they were decorated beautifully, from the plush carpets to the chandeliers to the sumptuous wall hangings.

And this approach at the high end of the market has more or less continued through to the present day.

But in the early 1900s, a man named E.M.

Statler pioneered a different, more affordable version of the hotel.

He wanted people to have a reliable, predictable kind of hotel experience so they would always know what they were getting.

That's A.K.

Sandoval Strauss.

He's an associate professor of history at Penn State, and he wrote the book Hotel: an American History.

In 1908, the Statler Hotel opened in Buffalo, New York.

It was the first of a number of economical, standardized hotel locations that promised customers, in Statler's words, to provide a bed and a bath for a dollar and a half.

And he was the most influential hotel man of the first half of the 20th century.

So,

for quite some time, the idea, oh, we'll democratize the hotel.

We'll create very standardized experiences.

That actually carried prestige.

If you were traveling to a new, strange city, just knowing that the cheap hotel you'd end up at would be of a basic level of quality and not say a bedbug-infested flop house was an innovation, a kind of luxury, even.

Reliability was so desirable that nearly 70 years after the first Statler Hotel, other hotels were still crowing about it.

Sorry, we never got your reservation.

Surprise!

You get enough surprises when you travel.

That's a commercial from 1975 for holiday inn hotels, promising its customers, above all else, a predictable experience.

That lets you know at every holiday inn, the best surprise is no surprise.

Because art didn't serve the customer experience directly, you don't sleep on the paintings after all.

Hotels, despite being standardized in many other ways, often relied upon operator taste or lack thereof for the art.

30 years ago, before the arrival of digital printers, the only way to reproduce art affordably was to do massive runs of an image.

This meant hotel owners were often picking from a small pool of pieces, each of which had to work in multiple locations.

This is where your classic kitschy hotel art comes from, a dearth of options.

Here's David Winton, the president of Calisher, a North Carolina-based company that makes art for the hospitality industry on this pre-digital era.

Art for hospitality, historically, people thought about it as an illustration of a flower or

something that got mass-produced and printed thousands of, and then hopefully that would work okay in hundreds of hotels around the world.

But then the backlash to all the sameness arrived.

As with so many things related to hotel design and art in hotels, we need to go back to this pivotal moment in the 1980s when Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell introduced a completely new concept,

the boutique hotel phenomenon.

That's Mayor Russ, the West Coast editor of Architectural Digest.

In the late 1980s, the hotelier Ian Schrager, one of the co-founders of Studio 54, opened a few hotels in New York that immediately became sensations.

One was the Royalton, which was designed by the singular Frenchman Philippe Stark, whose witty, playful lobby included velvet armchairs that leaned back at a precipitous angle, wall sconces in the shapes of rhinoceros horns, and three-legged chairs that had a tendency to tip over.

The hotels in New York became the gathering spots for the Beaumont.

You know, this gave birth to a movement of hoteliers who wanted to signify cool in some way, to signify chic,

and to draw people into their properties by, you know, promising an experience of like-minded people.

These early boutique hotels had an elevated, even unexpected style.

They weren't standardized because they wanted to set themselves, and by extension, the person who stayed there apart.

These hotels could be funky, elegant, sexy, but they were always deeply intentional with a very strong sense of place because the whole idea was that when you were there, you weren't nowhere.

You were somewhere.

In the 30 years since this idea that a hotel ought to be a designed experience, it has expanded beyond boutique hotels to most hotels and then further still.

David Winton's company, Kalisher, has worked with many hotels from best westerns to Four Seasons.

And Winton says, despite these hotels' different price points and styles, they want the same thing.

You want to have an experience about that place.

And so while the best western art might be a framed print, maybe showing an interesting

landmark from the town or an interesting moment from the area.

And the Four Seasons piece has an original painting from an artist in the neighborhood.

It's still intended to give you a sense of place and wanted to make you feel like you haven't just gone to a random white box in the middle of nowhere.

You are in Idaho.

You are in Paris.

This was what Super 8s were after too.

Super 8 never had an art program.

It was always you must have two pieces of art within the room.

That's Mike Mueller, the senior vice president and brand leader for Super 8 Worldwide, explaining what the chain decided to put on the walls after it took down all that kitsch.

And it came to our attention as we were starting to think about how do we shake off the dust of a perception that Super 8 is like your grandfather's old hotel.

And so we had a concept to take, take all the wall art down and take the headboards out.

What if we took that headboard, turned that into the art, and combined those pieces?

And so now we've got these oversized from top of bed to the ceiling, black and white photographs.

If you walk into a Super 8 today, instead of seeing a mass-produced impressionistic sailboat, you'll see two huge, chunkily framed, very polished black and white photographs above the bed.

These images are not just of anything.

They're related to the specific location of that specific Super 8.

At the Fort Worth Super 8, for example, there's a photograph of a cowboy on a horse in silhouette, getting ready to use his lasso.

At the Los Angeles Super 8, there's a photograph of the Mann Chinese theater lit up at night.

This next generation of traveler, they're interested in things like farm to table.

They want to know where things are sourced.

They want to know where things are coming from,

where they can go for a truly local, authentic experience.

Super 8s, which are scattered all over North America and even in China, can often be found near inauspicious interstate exits.

I've stated a few in my life, driving away from college with a U-Haul full of stuff between Chicago and New York on a road trip somewhere in the Texas panhandle.

And I could not possibly be more specific about their locations because that was what was so useful about Super 8s.

They're just right there when right there is the middle of nowhere.

The idea of a Super 8 as a place that's anything other than a stopover, as a place that should be locally branded, it shows just how deeply this new idea of what a hotel should be has permeated.

Some days we celebrate the wins, like calling your best friend to congratulate them on a big promotion or texting your grandmother, happy birthday.

Other days we work through the tough stuff, like calling a partner to deliver bad news.

Whatever the reason for picking up the phone or sending that message, staying connected matters.

That's why in the rare event of a network outage, AT ⁇ T will proactively credit you for a full day of service.

That's the AT ⁇ T guarantee.

So what are you waiting for?

Send that message to someone you miss.

Make that call you've been putting off because those are the moments that matter most.

AT ATT: Connecting changes everything.

Terms and conditions apply.

Credit for fiber downtime lasting 20 minutes or more, or for wireless downtime lasting 60 minutes or more, caused by a single incident impacting 10 or more towers.

Must be connected to an impacted tower at onset of outage.

Restrictions and exclusions apply.

See ATT.com/slash guarantee for full details.

So how does art actually get into a hotel?

Generally speaking, the way a hotel, particularly a chain hotel, goes about getting its art is as follows.

You start with the developer, the people who own the actual property where the hotel sits.

The developer will hire an interior design firm to design a specific type of hotel at a specific budget.

They design the rooms and the lobby and the interior architecture.

They pick the furniture, the fixtures, and attend to the overall vibe of the place.

These interior design teams will then hire and work with another firm or sometimes an individual consultant to source the artwork for the space.

The reason the design teams don't just do this part themselves is because procuring art is a big, complicated job.

A hotel with say 200 rooms, hallways, conference rooms, and a lobby will need hundreds, if not thousands of pieces of art.

To find it, art consultants do a bunch of different things, from actually commissioning an artist to make an original work work for the hotel, to licensing art for the rooms, to searching for found objects or knickknacks at flea markets, to making the art in-house with an in-house art team and printing it on those giant versatile digital printers.

These printers make it easy and affordable to print in small batches.

Needless to say, it's not a coincidence that hotels have gotten much more interested in bespoke art as bespoke art has become so much cheaper.

Art firms can now easily create thoughtful artwork and reproductions, or just as easily make the sort of images that match the bedspread.

It really depends on what the hotel and the designers want.

Here's an example of the directions an art team might get.

You know, I want it to look and feel like this tiny doodle that I made on the back of a napkin.

Or I've got three key inspiration words, and they are red, no birds, and textural.

That was David Winton again.

Someone at his company will then create art that interprets and fits those specifications.

It's graphic design, a craft for sure, but not quite art making in the studio artist sense.

But there are artists of that ilk whose work appears in hotels too.

I'm Tom Swanson and I'm a visual artist.

My work focuses on,

to be honest, cranes in America.

So that's kind of it.

Tom loves cranes.

When we spoke, he had dozens of crane facts at the ready.

Cranes are the largest species in North America, and they migrate.

They have the largest migration in the United States, and Xandhill cranes, they migrate, it's the largest migration.

In his work, which has appeared in scores of high-end hotels, including Ritz-Carlton's, Four Seasons, and St.

Regis's, gilded cranes made out of metal leaf are applied to canvassed or aged panels, which can be quite large.

In one piece, half a dozen silver cranes in flight sweep past leafless trees that are rendered in bright copper.

In another, the cranes cranes are semi-obscured by the tangled branches of a silver tree.

Tom has gallery representation and regularly shows his work, but he says about 75% of his business is commissions from private customers and the hospitality industry.

For Tom, dealing with them is pretty much the same, except that hotel jobs can extend over years and tend to pay better.

The process starts with a conversation about what the client wants, which is to say it's collaborative.

I encourage them to bring ideas so that we can can talk a little bit about how we might incorporate that into my language.

There's a back and forth in the hospitality business between the consultant and the artist and eventually the designers and the developers who have to approve everything that wouldn't suit everyone and is at odds with our romanticized ideas of the uncompromising, difficult artist, if not the reality of it.

But it works for Tom and for lots of working artists for whom hotels are a lucrative way to make a living and an effective way to locate potential customers.

When working with hospitality, I'm trying to match it up to where my client base is.

The sweet spot for my work is somewhere between $15,000 and $30,000 apiece.

So, you know, I really need to match my primary client and what their aspirations are and where they might stay.

Then you're imagining hotels kind of like an advertisement for you.

That's exactly right.

I can't tell you how many commissions I've gotten because people went to Jackson Hole to go skiing and stayed in the four seasons.

When you talk to people involved in the hotel art industry, all of the developments sound positive.

Hotels care more than ever about the quality of what they hang on their walls.

It's easier than ever to make and get art of quality to hang there.

Hotels are even hiring real artists and helping them to make a living.

And all of this is true, but there's another part of the hotel art equation we haven't talked about yet.

A player who's not the hotel or the middleman or the graphic designer or the artist, who's not directly involved in the business of hotel art.

And that's you and me, the people who look at it.

And for customers and for viewers, there's another question we have to ask.

Can hotel art really function as art?

New hotel art may be better, but can it be good?

You know those little check-ins like calling your grandmother to say happy birthday or texting your friends just to gossip?

Feels good, right?

It's those shared moments that matter most because staying connected matters.

That's why in the rare event of a network outage, AT ⁇ T will proactively credit you for a full day of service.

That's the ATT guarantee.

So take a moment to connect.

Make the call to your parents you've been putting off.

Send a quick message to an old friend.

And do it all knowing you've got ATT behind you.

Credit for fiber downtime lasting 20 minutes or more or for wireless downtime lasting 60 minutes or more caused by a single incident impacting 10 or more towers.

Must be connected to impacted tower at onset of outage.

Restrictions and exclusions apply.

See att.com/slash guarantee for full details.

ATNT.

Connecting changes everything.

From my perspective, those black and whites on the wall are even worse than what used to be there.

That's David Raskin, the Mohen Family Professor of Contemporary Art History at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

What used to be in most motels was

things that were just, you know, generic indicators of art.

So you knew you weren't supposed to pay attention to it, which was kind of the ideal.

You didn't put any demands on you.

If you noticed it at all, the lesson was, don't pay me any attention.

Before speaking with him, I had sent him some pictures of the new art in the Super 8 hotels, the big frame photographs of local sites.

He had some bracingly strong opinions about them.

These,

you know, kind of gorgeous, kind of artsy photographs, the black and white photographs of local scenery that Super Aid is now gone to, you know, look like what art should look like, which is even worse because they've just turned it into branding and decoration and a claim on a kind of upscale lifestyle existence.

It

basically ruins all art because it says if these, you know, gorgeous black and white images are actually nothing, then all art is actually nothing.

Is there no way to have a meaningful encounter with art in a setting of a hotel?

There's no way to have a meaningful encounter in art where that art, the purpose of that art and the nature of that art is simply to make claims on the

lifestyle that the viewer aspires to.

This is so much more extreme than the ways I had been considering hotel art, which seems so harmless to me.

And while I think it's absurd to insist that no one has ever had an experience they find meaningful with the art in a hotel, I've been thinking about this conversation ever since.

There's always going to be attention inherent in hotel art because it's never just or even primarily art.

It's always something else, too.

A decorative prop that's supposed to make you feel positively about the place that you're staying.

And what horrifies Raskin is not just that hotels use art as decoration.

What horrifies him even more is the way that hotels turn art into lifestyle branding.

Remember that Holiday Inn ad?

The best surprise is no surprise.

This This is not at all how hotels advertise themselves today.

Here's an ad from 2013 from Marriott, the hotel brand that owns several lines of hotels up and down the price and luxury spectrum.

This is not a hotel.

It's an idea that travel should be brilliant.

The promise of spaces as expansive as your imagination.

Offering surprises that will change as often as you do.

I find this ad so deeply silly.

Please notice the use of the word surprise in it though, which in a complete reversal, hotels are now promising their guests they will provide.

The travel is no longer the surprise, it's the hotel itself.

Though, as this ad would have it, the hotel isn't even a hotel anymore.

All of this is what happens when hotels have ceased to be just a place to stay and have become instead aspirational.

In a crowded marketplace, being merely functional, saying you've got four walls and a bed and won't lose a reservation, it isn't enough to distinguish you.

So hotels have had to become signifiers, not just of class, which they've always been, but of the micro-niches of class and taste.

And art, one of the most versatile aspects of any hotel, is one of the easiest ways for a hotel to announce its niche, to sell itself, to make you feel stuff about the hotel, and then preferably share that feeling with your friends on Instagram.

Probably,

at least on a weekly basis, when we're kicking off a project, an interior designer or a hotel owner will say, and we need to make sure we have at least one Instagram moment.

That's Ari Grazi, the founder of IndieWalls, a company that helps hotels find and work with artists.

And it is so much publicity, free publicity for the hotel.

Like everything else in a hotel, the art wants to affirm your choice to stay there.

Since it's trying to do that for many people, it's very rarely going to be genuinely challenging or provocative or political, unless all of those qualities are part of the hotel's brand.

Even if a hotel is showcasing work from a renowned artist, work that is undeniably art with a capital A, its meaty political and aesthetic substance might get subsumed by the hotel context.

Or at least that's what David Raskin thinks.

I mean, the real question is: let's say I go to a really fancy hotel in New York City, and there's an actual Monet painting in that hotel room.

And I'm looking at the Monet in my room, in my suite at the Ritz-Carlton.

What's my experience with that Monet?

And I'm contending that while there might be a little bit of Monet still there, mostly it's, wow, look at what the Ritz gives me.

The Ritz gives me a chance to see a Monet.

All of this doesn't mean that it's not nice to look at something beautiful in your hotel room.

It doesn't mean it's not nice to stay in a place that cares about the art.

It doesn't mean it's not nice to stay in a hotel that can show you a Monet or a Warhol or an installation from an up-and-coming local artist.

In fact, these things all sound exceedingly nice.

It's even nice from a certain perspective that hotels have decided art, of all that they could spend money on, is an important way to connect with their clientele.

But art, as opposed to decoration, as opposed to branding, it's supposed to be more than nice.

There used to be something that we believed we could get from art that is getting harder to believe in every day.

And that's that the artist has put something special in there for the viewer to work really hard to share.

And when that something special

is getting told is exactly the same as the fancy dining room table and the rug,

then we're losing a lot.

There's a famous story about Mark Rothko, who in the late 1950s won a commission to create a series of paintings for the new Four Seasons restaurant in New York.

It was a lucrative and prestigious assignment, and Rothko's work would have hung near Pollock's and Picasso's.

But the story goes that in 1959, as the restaurant was preparing to open, he went and had a meal there.

He had hoped that his art would exert a force on the space.

He had told a friend, I hope to ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room.

But what he discovered instead was that his paintings would be no match for an expensive power lunch.

His work, in this context, would become, to use a phrase that was leveled critically at his abstractions, just apocalyptic wallpaper.

So he pulled it.

I find this story and Rothko's standards to be very moving, but I'm not nearly so principled.

I like to think I've had a few profound experiences with art in my life, but sometimes when I walk into museum galleries, the first thing I do is scan the room and think, I'd like that on my wall.

In other words, my first reaction to a piece of art is purely acquisitive.

It's to wish that I owned it.

I don't want to speak for you, but I think this makes me like a lot of people who sometimes relate to art in a thoughtful, meaningful way, and more often relate to it in a not thoughtful, meaningful way.

One of the knock-on effects of all the technological advances that have made it easier and cheaper to create, reproduce, and distribute art than ever before is that it is easier than ever before to have this kind of casual, unthinking relationship to art.

We now constantly find ourselves in extremely designed commercial spaces that are chock full of professional art.

And that's a kind of catch-22 because there's more art around us than ever.

So how can we attend to it all or even very much of it?

And I think the truth is that often we don't.

And that's a loss.

That's what I take from Raskin's argument.

Art is now like so many other pieces of culture, like mood music or the TV that's on while you do the chores or the movie you watch while texting.

We can of course still get meaning from it, but there is a kind of work you have to do before you can get to that meaning.

You actually have to pay attention.

At some point, while I was working on this piece, the reams and reams of tasteful high-end hotel art that I I was seeing all started to feel the same.

What ends up happening in spaces that are so exactingly designed, and you might be familiar with this from farm-to-table restaurants or impeccably sourced coffee houses or so many other aspects of modern consumer life, is that a focus on quality, on uniqueness, on locality, on experience ends up amounting to a kind of claustrophobic sameness.

Everywhere you go, there you are, in a room with perfectly bespoke art that so carefully reflects presiding good taste, it looks exactly like all the other rooms full of perfectly bespoke art.

When presented with all of this idiosyncratic sameness, you may find yourself longing for something actually idiosyncratic, which brings us back to all that kitschy art the Super 8 got rid of.

It used to be that encountering good art in a hotel was shocking, but now the opposite is true.

Bad art is the outlier.

If you walk into a hotel room and see a black velvet painting of a white tiger, or a weird sculpture of a house cat, or some watercolor of a sad clown, you might get the actual jolt, the friend, the call to attention that you would usually only get from much better, more substantive art.

This sort of wanton display of bad taste, it's getting so rare, you just have to look at it.

And as good as good hotel art may be, it can't give you that charge.

Maybe in losing that, we really are losing something surprising, something genuinely unpredictable, as opposed to something unpredictable, end quotes, in the curated way of modern hotels.

Bad art of the truly unhinged variety may bode poorly for the rest of your hotel stay.

Maybe the bed will be lumpy, and maybe the food will be crappy, and maybe you'll have to talk to the clerk for too long.

But hey, doesn't that sound like what modern hotels are supposed to be all about?

A real experience?

This is Decodering.

I'm Willa Paskin.

You can find me on Twitter at Willa Paskin.

And if you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us at decodering at slate.com.

If you haven't yet, subscribe and rate our feed in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

And even better, tell your friends.

This podcast was written by Willa Paskin and produced and edited by Benjamin Frisch, who also does illustrations for every show.

Special thanks to Matthew Whitaker, Michelle Hunter, John Sarasulo, Punit Basine, Lauren Kane, Alice Grace Dice, Lisa Larson Walker, Kevin Hatch, Rob Myers, and everyone else who gave us help and feedback along the way.

Thanks for listening.

We'll see you next month.

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