AI Summary
5 min readHotel Art: The Hidden Industry Behind What Hangs on Your Hotel Wall
Jessica Poundstone remembers the message that changed her life. It came through Instagram from an art advisory firm: "Hey, we love your work. We'd love to discuss using it in a hotel project." At the time, she was working as a creative director for a software company. She wasn't familiar with art advisory firms, so she looked them up, quickly understood their business model, and thought, "Wow, this is very cool." Today, Poundstone works with a dozen such firms, selling her geometric, bright-colored digital art to cruise ships, casinos, restaurants, and hotels across the world.
When you think of hotel art, you might imagine a generic photograph of a city skyline or a bad abstract painting. The stuff on the walls at most big hotel chains has been bland and forgettable at best, laughable at worst. But in recent years, hotels have been trying to reverse this stigma. "They really have to up their game in order to get people to come back to the properties," says one industry insider. "So they'd rather have nothing at all than having something that makes people say, 'that's hotel art.'"
The Jewelry of the Space
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:00) **Intro: The Stigma of Hotel Art** - The episode opens with the common perception that hotel art is generic and forgettable, like a photo of stacked rocks.
- 2 (01:03) **Artist Jessica Poundstone Gets Discovered** - An art advisory firm contacts Poundstone via Instagram, opening her eyes to the commercial art world.
- 3 (01:53) **The Ubiquity of Hotel Art** - Poundstone describes how art is everywhere in a hotel: elevators, hallways, rooms.
- 4 (02:35) **The Shift Away from "Boring" Art** - Hotels are now trying to avoid the stigma of bad art to attract guests, with a focus on quality over quantity.
- 5 (03:36) **Best Western's Design Strategy** - Melanie Ketring, director of studio design at Best Western, explains that artwork is the "jewelry" of a hotel room, used to set the mood.
- 6 (04:05) **The Scale of Art Ordering** - Ketring reveals the standard is two pieces per room, with lobbies and public areas needing custom treatment based on the space.
- 7 (04:31) **The Old Way vs. The New Way** - Historically, hotels used stock photography. Now, Best Western tries to capture the local flavor with more intentional and contemporary art.
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Show Notes
A watercolor of a harbor? A black-and-white photo of a pile of rocks? Some hotels are trying to do better. Zachary Crockett unpacks. This episode was originally published on January 12th, 2025.
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