You’d be forgiven for failing to keep up with the hotel-art scene; after all, there aren’t New Yorker gallery listings for Pastoral Landscape at Super 8, Schenectady. Moreover, low-budget hotel art, like office building muzak, seems deliberately chosen to escape notice. It wouldn’t be too surprising to learn that the paintings were somehow there when the walls were erected, part of the hotel drywall package supplied by the contractor.
But as it happens, hotel art doesn’t come as part of the build-your-own-hotel starter kit. In fact, hotel art is just a niche of the larger commercial art world. As an artistic discipline, commercial art encompasses hotel art, paintings sold in HomeGoods and Cost Plus, paintings hung on the wall in department stores and small boutiques; essentially, any art you can purchase that doesn’t aspire to gallery placement. And behind each piece is an artist; someone like Brooklyn-based painter John Cerasulo, a professionally trained painter who, after years of museum and gallery exhibitions, transitioned away from the so-called “high-art” world to work full-time as a commercial artist. Now, his paintings hang in furniture stores, gift shops, and, of course, hotels.
Source: Atlas Abscura
