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.