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.