Designers See Hotels as Blank Canvas

[wolfnowl]

Worth a read for those selling prints: http://www.hotelnewsnow.com/Article/12509

Mike.

[bill t.]

With the rare exception of a truly top drawer hotel, the budget for buying in-room prints at hotels is only slightly larger than the monthly budget for toilet paper in the same room.  framah will back me up on this.

Selling prints to those guys is generally thought to be the worst imaginable sort of barrel scraping.  I recently stayed in a fairly decent hotel where the room "art" consisted of gallery wrapped ultra-blowups of half-tone patterns out of some unfortunate print.  The halftone dots were blown up into 1" diameter "abstractions."  That's typical say in Las Vegas, etc.

OTOH, in the early phases of the meltdown I did pretty well supplying a Santa Fe hotel with quite a few 30 x 70's for about 50% of the retail value.  Some rooms had old Taos School paintings valued in the tens of thousands installed in the 40's and 50's.  Several of my pieces replaced the most valuable of those, resulting in profits (to the hotel) of about 2000% over the cost of my meager replacements.  Unfortunately, those were the good old days ne'er to be seen again.

[Rob C]

Whatever interested parties such as architects and 'designers' claim, I suspect that my own experiences of hotels are fairly common: you want somewhere clean, safe and quiet where you return after doing whatever took you to that location in the first place. You want the plumbing to work and the bathrooms especially to be spotless. A good restaurant is also an essential, because traipsing off to unknown city restaurants isn't always the fantastic experience one might have hoped, and it's so pleasant to be able to drift off to bed without concerning oneself with taxis etc.

Of course, if name-dropping is part of the experience, then these people know how to pander to your needs.

Rob C

[Isaac]

fwiw A month ago, at the lowly Holiday Inn Express in Bozeman MT, I noticed that the downstairs corridors were decorated with panoramas by Craig Hergert and even the bathroom in the room had a small colourful abstract that was kind-of good.

[bill t.]

Did Craig's pieces have price tags or labels on them?  An increasingly popular scam scheme used by institutions is to invite artists to display their work for free, along with a discrete tag providing artist (and if you're lucky) purchase information.  Free art, which is even cheaper than buying halftone blowups.  Usually only worth it to the artist if the displaying party is willing to makes sales on the spot, because with art if you don't sell it right then and there when the customer is hot, you probably never will.

[Isaac]

No price tags. No indication that those particular photos were for sale (if they were). There must have been something that said Craig Hergert otherwise I wouldn't know. They seemed to be decoration.

[Rob C]

Paper version of micro-stock?

Rob C

[Alan Klein]

Last year my wife and I stayed at a hotel in Niagara Falls that was decorated in very nice photos of the falls.  I have no idea what they paid for them.  Here's a free giveaway idea related to the artocle above oif the hotel want to spend the money.  Install small HDTV's or similar LED sidplay units that the guest can select which type of picture they want display on the room walls.  Like palm trees and surf, mountain tops, or scenery of the local area.

[bill t.]

Alan, they've had those for a long time!  The favorite scenes are "Dancing with the Stars," "Game of Thrones," "Colpo Grosso," and "Tutti Frutti."

[Alan Klein]

Are those movies, TV shows or photos?

[bill t.]

I'm afraid those are TV shows.  Static art doesn't stand a chance with competition like that!  Televisions easily earn money for the hotel via movie rentals, but static art would not that, with the exception of mine of course.

I've been searching for an interview with a guy who manufactures framed art for resort hotels, but can't find it.  I recall he figured he was doing okay at the "low 20 dollar range" for a 22 x 28, aluminum sectional frame, single matte, glazed.  Minimum order around 1000 pieces.

[Alan Klein]

Glad I'm getting a pension.

[Eric Myrvaagnes]

Glad I'm getting a pension.

+1000!