Hotel Art Is Being Redefined by Luxury Properties with Warhols and Slim Aarons in Their Collections

From the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York to Miami’s Fontainebleau, luxury hotels are now competing in a new space—the pedigree of the art on their walls.

Artist Laura Kimpton became famous for her giant, wild installations at the Burning Man Festival, so she was surprised when the glitzy Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas called to say they had bought her twelve-foot-high sculpture, LOVE. At the opening party in 2016, festival veterans, businessmen, and tourists wandering by joined in the Champagne toast. But months later, Kimpton was in bed watching TV only to see the well-known cast of a reality TV show climbing on her artwork.

Dozens of luxury hotels are now using pricey art—like Damien Hirst’s gold-encrusted woolly mammoth out by the pool at Miami’s ritzy Faena Hotel—as shorthand to flag guests that they are staying at a high-end, design-savvy insider property. The strategy sometimes soars, sometimes backfires, but one thing’s for sure: In the art world, nobody expected The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills to be climbing on their work.

As art has skyrocketed in value and visibility in recent years, several dozen so-called art hotels have sprung up around the world. Others, like the Pierre in New York, have recently launched dedicated gallery spaces, while some who’ve long had major art collections, like the Pfister Hotel in Milwaukee’s Victorian art, are just playing up their treasures.

For the most part, of course, artists love the trend: another market for their works, another audience, and, quite often, an avalanche of selfies and Instagrams. But there are deeper reasons, too. Says Ai Weiwei, whose spectacular trio of crystal chandeliers was installed at Miami’s Fontainebleau Hotel a few years ago, “Since globalization, people are traveling all the time—I’ve traveled 150 times since 2015.” For the 60-year-old artist, hotels have become “an important human element of that journey or exploration.” Furthermore, art can give “a temporary home the quality of a home,” he concludes.

Steve Wynn started it all, explains Victor Wiener, the art appraiser called in by Lloyd’s of London when Wynn famously put his elbow through a Picasso in 2006. For the Bellagio, and then for other Wynn properties, “he bought good art, spent a lot of money on it, and they weren’t reproductions.” Guests quickly received the implied message that the most luxurious hotel in town must have been the one with multi-million-dollar masterpieces right behind the check-in desk.

Tourist traffic comes with its problems, however. Hyper-realistic sculptor Carole Feuerman, who has had her work in about a dozen hotels worldwide, from Venice to Hong Kong, routinely makes runs to Sephora to replace the eyelashes gawkers pull off her life-size sculptures of swimmers and dancers. “I don’t get it,” she says, adding that it happens more often in the U.S. than in other countries.

Of course, there are two kinds of hotel art: the appealing portraits and landscapes displayed in the public spaces and the bland works hung in the rooms. Surprisingly, both are changing, experts say. Lauren Katz of the Getty photo library says, “Hotels are getting rid of the sunflowers, even in the rooms.” She credits this as part of a trend toward creating an “experience” for the guests. In fact, Katz recently installed Slim Aarons’s glamorous photos of Palm Springs in the penthouse of the Quin Hotel near Carnegie Hall. It’s a way for the five-star hotel to subtly remind guests of its art heritage (both Mark Chagall and Georgia O’Keeffe have lived in the famous hotel).

Good looks aside, this is pretty much a branding exercise. The Cosmopolitan, a relatively new Las Vegas hotel at eight years old, immediately established itself with a younger clientele by housing a cutting-edge contemporary art collection. “The element of surprise is core to The Cosmopolitan experience,” says its art consultant Krista Chmielewski. “Happening upon an eight-foot-tall oversize stiletto sculpture or a mural by some of the most influential street artists of our time—in the parking garage, of all places—fits right into that manifesto.”

Of course, there are two kinds of hotel art: the appealing portraits and landscapes displayed in the public spaces and the bland works hung in the rooms. Surprisingly, both are changing, experts say. Lauren Katz of the Getty photo library says, “Hotels are getting rid of the sunflowers, even in the rooms.” She credits this as part of a trend toward creating an “experience” for the guests. In fact, Katz recently installed Slim Aarons’s glamorous photos of Palm Springs in the penthouse of the Quin Hotel near Carnegie Hall. It’s a way for the five-star hotel to subtly remind guests of its art heritage (both Mark Chagall and Georgia O’Keeffe have lived in the famous hotel).
Good looks aside, this is pretty much a branding exercise. The Cosmopolitan, a relatively new Las Vegas hotel at eight years old, immediately established itself with a younger clientele by housing a cutting-edge contemporary art collection. “The element of surprise is core to The Cosmopolitan experience,” says its art consultant Krista Chmielewski. “Happening upon an eight-foot-tall oversize stiletto sculpture or a mural by some of the most influential street artists of our time—in the parking garage, of all places—fits right into that manifesto.”

Most of the great hotel art spaces are one- or two-offs fueled by the collecting passion of their owners. Think of real-estate developer Aby Rosen, whose Warhols and other works inhabit both the W in Miami and the Gramercy in New York. Or even collecting couple Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson, who founded the U.S. chain of art-heavy 21c Museum Hotels.

But art is coming to all strata of properties. Consider Zurich, where the hilltop castle The Dolder Grand has long competed with 1844 veteran the Baur au Lac Hotel for the biggest annual art fuss, with Salvador Dalis and Yves Kleins just a few names in their arsenal. But crosstown, hipster 25hours Hotel Langstrasse opened last year and has become “very popular,” according to city tourism official Aurelia Carlen, because it features spaces for artists in residence and invites would-be guests to swap art for a night in the hotel. (Guests upload an image of the item for swap before they arrive, for approval.)

That just might pay off for the 25hours Hotel. Perhaps the world’s best-known art hotel, the Colombe d’or in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, tried a similar strategy decades ago. Its guests once included Pablo Picasso and Fernand Léger. Now there’s a Calder mobile by the swimming pool.