Although they may not be exchanging pieces for lodging, some artists — and their galleries — are profiting from the art-hotel phenomenon. It enables their works to be viewed for extended periods by an audience including not only hotel guests but also visiting locals, in luxury settings in different cities and often surrounded by other notable works, as they might be in a museum.

This visibility may well translate into sales. Roxy Paine’s New York dealer, James Cohan, says the artist’s commission for the Sagamore lobby "has had a huge and wonderful impact — especially with all the people who come for the fair. When it’s done with great respect for the art, when it steps outside of decoration, it works." Cohan stresses that for him a sale to a hotel is not on par with one to a museum but says he takes into account the purchaser’s intent to put it on view when determining price and discount.

That type of accounting has benefited Joan Warren-Grady’s clients. "Since most artists and galleries have been thrilled at the opportunity to be placed in these collections, discounts have, for the past 10 years at least, been part of my equation," says Warren-Grady, who adds that she gets artists and dealers to come down 20 to 50 percent on sales to prestigious hotel groups like the Four Seasons and Atlantis.

Indeed, as galleries trim production costs and museums tighten their belts, artists may find hotel commissions desirable as a means of support. The largest hotel-related art project now under way, and a blatant bid for the patronage of the sophisticated traveler, is the $40 million worth of new public art that is to go on view at MGM Mirage’s City Center, the mixed-use property in Las Vegas that will open later this year with hotels by such starchitects as Rafael Viñoly as well as commissioned art from Jenny Holzer, Maya Lin, Nancy Rubins and others. "A recession may actually privilege such projects, with artists having more time to do a commissioned piece," says the cultural critic and Las Vegas resident Dave Hickey, "and it may make them a little more cost-effective for the hotels."

Some artists are even marketing their work in hotels. On the Caribbean island of Saint Barts, frequented by such art-savvy visitors as the New York dealers Mary Boone, Larry Gagosian and Tony Shafrazi, the Eden Rock resort has an art gallery where in the winter of 2007-08 Richard Prince created, exhibited and then sold a series of 16 paintings priced at $150,000 each and a collage that the gallery’s director, Natalie Clifford, says brought "in the millions."

The Chambers in Minneapolis houses the Burnet Art Gallery, a commercial space that generally takes the typical 50 percent of each sale but, if an artist has representation, may reduce its share to 25 percent. Two years ago it sold out a show of modestly priced ($1,000 to $5,000) mixed-media works by the local emerging artist Janet Lobberecht. The three-year-old James Hotel, in Chicago, has a small outpost of the local dealer Monique Meloche in its business lounge and, as a complement to the 160-painting collection he assembled for the Schloss Fuschl, just outside Salzburg, a branch of the Munich-based Old Masters dealer Konrad Bernheimer’s gallery.

The casino owner Steve Wynn pioneered the art-hotel trend in 1998, when he began displaying his high-profile Renoirs, Monets, van Goghs and the like in the art gallery of his Bellagio, in Las Vegas, to draw attention and prestige to the property. The Chambers’s Burnet made Wynn his model. "I was taken aback by the fact that there were Picassos out in the open," he says. "I thought, ‘He’s allowing art in public areas and he’s fearless about it.’ " The Bellagio, now owned by MGM Mirage, was in a six-year partnership with PaceWildenstein gallery as well as with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which loaned works from its collection for temporary shows; the hotel still exhibits works on loan — or "rental," as some detractors have put it — from such institutions as the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.

In most art hotels, the "hotel" is primary, but in one case at least, that relationship has been reversed. In 2006 the Louisville, Kentucky, collectors Steve Wilson and Laura Lee Brown (whose family owns the Brown-Forman wine and spirits company, of Jack Daniel’s whiskey fame) sought to revitalize the city’s culturally sleepy downtown by founding a museum to house their cutting-edge contemporary-art collection. They soon decided they wanted to convince visitors not just to come but to linger in the area. Thus was born the 21C Museum Hotel, whose motto is "Stay with Art."