In a podcast by the BBC, poet and journalist Ian McMillan takes an often existential visit to and view of hotel art.
Hotel art is important.
Maybe we do not always see it, but it is the type of thing that we’d notice, or not notice, if it was not there. Rather like muzak.
McMillan ropes in Roger Luckhurst, author of “Passages of Modernity” (Reaktion Books), to help him understand the phenomenon of hotel art.
“[A sense of familiarity] is also partly what the art is doing on the wall. It needs to be relatively inoffensive, something that you can almost stare through,” Luckhurst tells him.
Hotel art adds to the “existential freedom ... provided by anonymous hotels, so, a wiping clean,” he added.
Such things influence guests, and Hotel News Now is an example of that.
The HNN team has decided to book a new hotel for our participation at next month’s International Hotel Investment Forum in Berlin, partly because we like a change and partly because we have had enough of the hotel art in the place we have booked for the past couple of years.
It was interesting, let’s put it like that, but now is a time for change, a time for new art.
Someone has purposely made hotel art so, not perhaps for that Berlin hotel, but definitely for others, McMillan pointed out.
Rami Fustok, owner and operator of London independent hotel The Mandrake, told him that some of the art, but not all, in his hotel is meant to make guests “move out of their shell and be more extraordinary. … The hotel is not for everyone, but I would want people to actually feel comfortable being uncomfortable.”
The podcast interviews Patrick McCrae, owner of London-based art consultancy and agency, ARTIQ, who explains Accor chairman and CEO Sébastien Bazin’s strategy of bring local elements, including art, into his hotels.
“If we make our hotels for the locals, then guests and holidaymakers will want to come, and that’s because local people understand local spaces,” McCrae paraphrased Bazin.
One artist told McMillan the art in one hotel was inspired by the view outside the rooms.
As simple as that in some cases.
Another artist designing for Premier Inn said her art depicting flowers is spread across some 20,000 rooms and, in her calculation, has been seen by more than 22 million guests.
McMillan said one word he picked up on in his hotel-art travels was the word “curation,” and that curation included a room with no windows but a scene of New York City.
There is some psychology or science involved, too.
Richard Lewis, managing director at Portobello Art, told the presenter that “we always try for safe in the bedroom, interesting in the corridor and then go for it downstairs in front of house.”
That is not the same Richard Lewis as the one whose art show I attended and wrote about here just a few short weeks ago, but I enjoyed the coincidence of names.
I hope you find the listen as fascinating as I did.
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