Art Checks In

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Artful Lodgings

These days, the globe-trotting creative guest has a stunning variety of art-oriented hotels to choose from.

Damien Hirst Andy Warhol Pablo Picasso Tracey Emin James Turrell Robert Mapplethorpe Olaf Breuning Jenny Holzer

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In E. L. Konigsburg’s well-loved children’s book From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, an 11-year-old girl and her younger brother run away from home to live among the masterpieces at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Over the past 10 years or so, a new breed of luxury hotels has sprung up that allows guests to live a similar fantasy during their stays, eating, sleeping and socializing surrounded by pieces by blue-chip artists.

These ventures, most of which focus on contemporary work, represent an effort by hoteliers to distinguish themselves by capitalizing on the art world’s growing glamour and globalization. With collectors hopping from fairs to biennials to museum openings, it’s no surprise that the hospitality industry has rushed to accommodate both those actually traveling with art’s movable feast and also, perhaps even more profitably in the long term, aspirants to that lifestyle. Mixing luxury with top-tier culture benefits not only the hotels’ owners, whose niche properties have garnered high occupancy rates and increased media coverage, but also the artists whose work appears in them.

Art provides hotels with a new way of branding themselves, says Joan Warren-Grady, a San Diego-based art adviser, who adds that the displays also create a strong "visual memory" for guests, making them more likely to return and to pass the word on to others. Warren-Grady, who has built collections for more than 200 luxury hotels, including the Four Seasons in Miami and San Francisco, notes that one reason her clients began to accumulate museum-quality art in the early 1990s was the revenue generated by their sales of condo-hotels.

But if this additional discretionary income helped hotels put the works on their walls, their shift of focus from decoration to capital-"A" art was part of a broader new approach to luxury — and to creating an aspirational environment for a sophisticated guest. "It used to be about innovating in the rooms, making them more comfortable with things like higher-thread-count sheets," says Jonah Disend, who runs the New York-based branding consultancy Redscout. "But then it started to move to the entire hotel."

Another factor is the rise of entrepreneurial collectors, who have employed hotels as showcases for their holdings and to enhance the existing cultural offerings in their communities. In Miami, a town filled with properties competing for the same clientele, the local arts patrons Christine "Cricket" Taplin and her husband, Marty, a real estate developer, have turned the historic Sagamore hotel, in South Beach, into a destination for culture vultures. The couple bought the property in 1997, renovated it and then, in 2001, inspired by the upcoming Art Basel Miami Beach (ABMB) fair, filled it with pieces from their prodigious contemporary-art collection. Every year since, before visitors arrive for ABMB in December, Cricket, who acts as the Sagamore’s curator, changes its display of videos, painting, sculpture and photographs by such international artists as Spencer Tunick and Massimo Vitali and by local talents like the Cuban-born painter José Bedia.

The hotel’s installation program was immediately gratifying, says Taplin, because "it made art accessible to everybody. It opened doors for people who were maybe intimidated or confused about how to get started collecting. I think we’ve made our mark that way." The Taplins have also commissioned a number of works, including Roxy Paine’s hyperrealistic mushroom sculptures, installed in 2001, which appear to grow from a wall over the front desk, and a temporary monumental sand sculpture of a reclining female figure on the hotel’s beachfront that the Swiss artist Olaf Breuning created last December.

In 2006, about a year after the Walker Art Center reopened in Minneapolis with a gleaming new building by Herzog & de Meuron, the local arts patron and real estate magnate Ralph Burnet, who had served as the museum’s board chairman in the 1990s, launched the 60-room Chambers hotel, a sibling of the New York establishment of the same name (but with a different owner). Burnet, who calls the venture his "mini Walker," filled it with 200 items from his 700-work collection, which focuses on YBAs, such as Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst and Gary Hume. Video pieces, including some by William Wegman, play on monitors throughout the hotel, and guests can also view them on televisions in their rooms, each of which contains original artworks.

The proprietors of these hotel-museums have no doubt that their displays are key to luring discerning travelers. Clifford Atkinson, the general manager of the Chambers, calls the property’s art collection the "critical success factor," ranking it above both the quality of service and the Jean-Georges Vongerichten restaurant. "We attribute approximately 25 percent of our business specifically to the Chambers art experience," says Atkinson, who adds that the benefit is mutual, with exposure in the hotel boosting the value of the $7 million collection.

Boutique establishments were the first to adopt the art-hotel model, but now the big chains are jumping on board to gain an edge in a crowded field. "There’s more competition for something that captures the spirit of a place and gives more of an identity," says Disend, noting that art makes a hotel "a destination in itself, a place you would go, the way you go to Marfa."

One chain currently rebranding itself in this way is Le Méridien. Eva Ziegler, the senior vice president of the parent company, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, has said that the goal is to take on other art hotels and go them one better by making the program interactive. Three years ago Ziegler, who manages marketing and operations for Le Méridien, hired Jérôme Sans, the cofounder of the Palais de Tokyo, in Paris, and now the director of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, in Beijing, as "cultural curator" for the chain’s 110 international locations. Sans has aestheticized nearly every aspect of the hotels, hiring artists to design key cards that "unlock art" by providing guests with free admission to participating local museums and commissioning other talents to create environmental video projections for the hotels’ entrances, which the hotel’s Web site claims are not simply lobbies but "transitional portals," and even infusing the rooms with a signature scent. "We are . . . a global platform for artists to get their works exposed in a new way to a wider audience," says Ziegler.

For proof of the importance of art to hotel brands, one need only speak with Fred Kleisner, the CEO of the Morgans Hotel Group, which in 1984 opened what many consider the first "boutique" property, Morgans, in New York, whose coolly Minimalist interiors were designed by Andrée Putman. The firm’s signature blend of art, architecture and design is evident in all its 12 locations in the U.S. and the U.K. The Manhattan flagship reopened last year after a makeover that added original Robert Mapplethorpe photographs, bought for $300 apiece back in the 1980s, to every room and on the lobby ceiling a customizable lcd-light installation by the French art/design duo Trafik. The Morgans-owned Mondrian in Los Angeles features light pieces by James Turrell, and Mondrian South Beach was designed entirely by the art and design wunderkind Marcel Wanders, who transformed it into a fairy-tale space with giant bell-shaped chandeliers and a black "floating" staircase that cost $850,000.

Why spend huge sums on such things? "Art is an extension of our design," says Kleisner. "It’s not just art going into a hotel — the hotel is art. There is an interest in customization that is pervasive in consumerism. The last bastion of personalized experience is in hotels."

Ian Schrager may not consider his Gramercy Park Hotel an art destination, but when he renovated it three years ago, he enlisted Julian Schnabel to design the public spaces — which now contain such signature Schnabel touches as the extravagant chandelier and decadent, deep red carpet in the lobby — and stocked them with a rotating display of pricey contemporary artworks by Hirst, Richard Prince and Andy Warhol, loaned by high-powered collector friends like Alberto Mugrabi and Aby Rosen.

"A person who really loves art loves the opportunity to have the art displayed here and be appreciated by lots of people," says Schrager, who sees the Gramercy as an update of New York’s famed Hotel Chelsea, with its bohemian attitude and "spontaneity and energy." Many years ago, the Chelsea let creative types pay with their works in lieu of cash.

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."

Designed by the New York-based architect Deborah Berke, who was also behind the Manhattan dealer Marianne Boesky’s West 22nd Street gallery and penthouse project, the building contains a 9,000-square-foot space for nonselling shows that include loans from museums. The art program, which is run by the couple’s foundation, is partially funded by revenues from the hotel and adjoining restaurant. The model has proved profitable: 21C leads the local market in terms of occupancy and room rates and has seen 150,000 people come through the door since it opened, says its director, William Morrow.

The current economic downturn could slow the art-hotel trend, but for now, it is still going strong. Wilson and Brown, for example, have been approached by developers in Chicago, Cincinnati, Fort Worth and Austin who want 21Cs in their cities. Exhibitions in these properties, which would travel from one to another, as in a museum tour, would draw on the foundation’s collection of more than 2,000 works and, like the shows at the Louisville location, borrow from other institutions.

In bringing art to the broader public, this version of the art hotel has much in common with iconoclastic contemporary-art museums such as the Palais de Tokyo. As Le Méridien’s Jérôme Sans explains, the Palais aimed to yank art from a typical institutional setting and weave it into the fabric of society, making it accessible by opening at unconventional hours and providing a lively bar. With nonprofit support for the arts very likely dwindling in the near future, this mission could well be kept alive by the hospitality industry.

"Art Checks In" originally appeared in the May 2009 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's May 2009 Table of Contents.