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.
