The Fall and Rise of Hotel Art
In 2016, the world's largest budget hotel chain, Super 8, underwent an art makeover. Whatever you imagine when you imagine quintessentially kitschy hotel art—a deer by a babbling brook near a lamplit cottage, a Bob Ross paint-by-numbers special, powdery winterscapes of quaint villages, maybe even a velvet painting if you're lucky—that's the kind of stuff that had been hanging in Super 8 rooms since the chain was founded in 1974.
In 2016, the world's largest budget hotel chain, Super 8, underwent an art makeover. Whatever you imagine when you imagine quintessentially kitschy hotel art—a deer by a babbling brook near a lamplit cottage, a Bob Ross paint-by-numbers special, powdery winterscapes of quaint villages, maybe even a velvet painting if you're lucky—that's the kind of stuff that had been hanging in Super 8 rooms since the chain was founded in 1974. But at two events, one hosted by Amy Sedaris at a gallery space in New York and another at Art Basel in Miami, Super 8 gave much of it away, a signal that the age of kitsch hotel art was, for Super 8s, officially over.