Singapore slung

This is from a nice hotel in Singapore, and a nice room. Most of the art in the room was actually quite tasteful, and I didn't mind it at all, but the main living area was dominated by this six foot monstrosity;

(Oil on canvas. Unsigned.)

What is it? I thought letters originally, but the phallic thing bottom centre has the look of a tower with an angled roof on it. The green bits do look a bit like the ever present trees around Singapore. Are these supposed to be city blocks? Horrific.

High Anxiety

After a long absence, the Conference Season is upon us again. I've had some holiday travel, but disappointingly there has been no bad art in the hotels, but now I'm back to business travel, and already we have a corker. I can feel that this will be a good Autumn.

So I'm currently on the 39th floor of a large chain hotel in Frankfurt (no names, no pack drill). Fantastic views when it manages to stop raining, but somehow being so high up there's just that hint of post-9/11 worry that an airliner may be about to make contact with your room. So what better to calm the disquiet of the nervous guest than this:

(Print on canvas, 1m x 1m, unsigned)

Yes, a slightly modernist musing on blazing skyscrapers, one of which  (from the logo) appears to be the nearby Deutsche Bank building. Wunderbar! Is it a comment on the financial inferno that is raging in the Eurozone? A reminder that all of man's proudest achievements are merely worldly vanities which must one day pass away? Or just a 'bankers we hate you' two fingered salute? Either way I think there is perhaps a joke intended here - I'm reminded obliquely of Mark Rothko's Seagram Murals, which were deliberately painted to put the well-heeled Park Avenue diners in the Seagram Building's plush Four Seasons restaurant off their incredibly expensive lunches.

It is clearly brand new, anyway - the hotel is in the middle of a refurbishment and they actually installed this painting only this morning; yesterday when I arrived there was merely a blank wall. There are paintings all down the corridor leaning against the wall, outside the doors of rooms that have not yet been cleaned, waiting to be installed, and I can say for definite that none of them are as bad as this (most of them seem to be renderings of 100 Euro banknotes). I am clearly blessed.

A Homage to Catalonia

Two for the price of one, this time. These come from a rather bland modern hotel in Barcelona, at the unfashionable end of the Avenue Diagonal, with some building works going on in surrounding streets that had evidently breached a sewage pipe, as everything smelt of shit. Did this colour my view of the works on offer? You decide...

So this is Exhibit C - an abstract collage complete with frowny eye ¬_¬ that seems to be staring at you in disapproval. The rays coming out of the front of the eye remind me of the way we had to draw the observer in physics experiment write-ups at school.


To be honest, I didn't mind it as much as the one next to it, which we will call Exhibit D.

There's something of the Caves of Lascaux here, something of the Corrida, although it's evidently (?) a horse (well, stallion, I'm guessing... if you see what I mean) and not a bull, but WTF has happened to its front legs? Spain is notorious for its animal cruelty, and I'm not so sure that no horses were harmed in the making of this picture.

Again, the second of our works has been signed. It looks like ∏ R. A fan of geometry, no doubt.

Mr Gorbachev - tear down this painting!

Exhibit B is from Berlin. If the Paris picture planted the seed of an idea last year, this is the picture that, this February, crystallised it and made me decide to create the site. I spent an unhappy week at a conference in the south-eastern suburbs, near Tempelhof airport and the old Berlin Wall. The Estrel Centre is a grey and utterly charmless concrete edifice, with jobsworth staff and rooms so minimalist that they seem to have sprung fully formed from an Ikea catalogue, like that bit at the start of Fight Club where Edward Norton is reflecting on how his life is a worthless exercise in conformist consumerism. Being central Europe, all art seems to be Modernist, and the pictures on the wall of the hotel are no exception. My room had this:

Lovely, isn't it? The child's drawing of a bus, moon, brain/labyrinth/stop sign and giant pair of Marilyn Monroe lips are presumably trying to send some kind of message about Berlin - night life, public transport, women - we have it all! It is all lovingly rendered in wax crayon squiggles overlaid with a colour wash, like you used to do at junior school. Top marks for keeping inside the lines, though, meister.

Not only signed this time, but dated. 'Pisak '95'.  Perhaps Herr/Frau Pisak was infused by the optimistic spirit of the 90s, after the fall of the Wall, when everything seemed possible - even getting paid for a child's picture of a bus in crayon.

The Archaeopteryx of Paris

So let's start with exhibit A. This is the work that first gave me the idea for the blog. It was a nice hotel in Paris - a bit poky but then they always are - near the Rue St Jacques and the Sorbonne. I was spending a weekend there last May with my girlfriend and we were on the top floor, looking out across the rooftops towards the Pantheon. The room was small but nice, perfectly liveable with, but it was dominated by this amazing picture;

I am not sure if it's faux naif or just by someone who isn't very good at painting. It's probably done by the hotel owner themselves. The style is sort-of Impressionist, but who could fail to be charmed by the spray of apparently dead flowers, or the strange creature squatting on the right, apparently looking at what might be a dragonfly above it.

I find there is something strangely hypnotic about the Green Bat-Bird of Death and its weird vampiric plumage. To me it looks like one of those reconstructions of a long extinct transitional form between dinosaurs and birds, like archaeopteryx;

What can one say but bravo, monsieur l'artiste!

A common theme you'll note is that most of our works are signed. This one is attributed to 'M. Alde'. Monsieur Alde? Or perhaps just Marcel. We may never know.

Ars Gratia Artis

So I spend a lot of time in hotel rooms. Hotel rooms are not the most cheery of places - they're often quite functional. That doesn't bother me too much, but they'd be ever less cheery if they just had bare walls. So hoteliers put pictures on the walls. The trouble is that pictures on the wall are a very individual thing. Everyone has their own different tastes, but hundreds of people might pass through a hotel room in a year, so the art of hotel rooms is bland and nondescript, aiming mainly not to annoy people rather than anything else. You know the kind of thing I mean - here is an example from a recent trip to Abu Dhabi;

It's brown, and yellow and orange, it has a couple of screen-printed ferns and a kind of tulip thing. It's not going to set the world alight, but it stops the wall from looking bare and unwelcoming.

But... occasionally someone steps outside the bland box. Probably they have a rather idiosyncratic view of what constitutes good art, or what 'everyone' will like, or maybe they just don't care, or maybe they got it cheap down the junk shop. And then a truly bad piece of hotel room art will grace a wall. This blog is about those works, as and when I encounter them.