Hotel Art
Decoder Ring
Slate Podcasts
4.6 • 2.2K Ratings
🗓️ 1 October 2018
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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Hotel Art used to be one of the ultimate symbols of bad taste, it was often ugly, kitschy, and strange. Today, the art you find in a hotel is far less likely to be the result of one individual's poor taste, and much more likely to have passed through an entire industry designed to help place art into hotels. Hotel art is now almost universally pleasant, if anodyne. How did this happen?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This podcast contains explicit language. |
| 0:06.0 | In 2016, the world's largest budget hotel chain, Super 8, decided to put on an art show. |
| 0:12.3 | If you're an art aficionado, this is the place to be, Miami and Art Basel. |
| 0:18.0 | But this year, something different, a new exhibition. This collection called |
| 0:23.0 | When the Art Comes Down, curated by Super 8. Yes, that's Super 8, proving everything old is new again. |
| 0:30.7 | Super 8 wanted to get rid of the art that had been in its motel rooms since the chain was |
| 0:34.5 | founded in 1974. Whatever you imagine when you imagine quintessentially |
| 0:39.7 | kitsy hotel art, a deer by a babbling brook near a lamplett cottage, a Bob Ross paint by |
| 0:45.5 | numbers special, powdery winterscapes of quaint villages, a velvet painting. That's the kind of |
| 0:51.7 | stuff that was on the walls of the Super 8s. Rather than just |
| 0:55.0 | throw it out, Super 8 gave the paintings away. At one event at Art Basil in Miami, which ended up on |
| 1:00.4 | the Today Show in the news clip you just heard, and another at a gallery space in New York, which was hosted |
| 1:05.7 | by the comedian Amy Sedaris. Sedaris named all the paintings, and she told Jimmy Fallon about it on The Tonight Show. |
| 1:12.6 | You just had an art show that's very exciting. Yes, Super 8 hotels and got rid of all their old art. They're bringing a new art. They're bringing a new art. They're bringing a new art. They're going to be city-specific. So, like, let's say you're in San Francisco. You don't remember where you are and you wake up and you'll see a painting of the Golden Gate Bridge or the Arch in St. Louis. |
| 1:29.6 | You got to name them. |
| 1:30.6 | I sure did. You don't remember where you are and you wake up and you'll see a painting of the Golden Gate Bridge or the arch in St. Louis. |
| 1:29.7 | You got to name, though? |
| 1:30.5 | I sure did. It was really hard. |
| 1:32.7 | Do you remember where you name this one? |
| 1:33.8 | Thalen is showing Sedaris a washed out painting of three spindly trees, birches maybe, that are emerging from a foreground of oversized slightly impressionistic tulips and are standing in front of a psychedelic |
| 1:45.3 | pastel sky. This one I don't remember, but let's call it early menopause. |
| 1:53.2 | We all know what we're talking. All of this was meant to bring attention to Superate's new |
... |
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