A Hotel That Lets You Be A Piece Of Living Art

The notion of a hotel room as a model of isolation is familiar to many people who travel for a living, which is why some hotels, even those catering to business road warriors, have started focusing on the communal spaces and community elements of life on the road. 

To a certain extent, the idea that the hotel is less about the need for basic shelter and instead, increasingly focusing on the experiential nature of the stay, is hardly a revelatory idea. Hoteliers and guests alike chase and quantify this ephemeral idea of “the perfect stay”, whether through reviews on TripAdvisor and Yelp or CRM software and engagement metrics.

Now, as Air BnB, mobile hotels and other concepts blur the lines of what a hotel space really entails, there are other ways that the fourth wall is being exposed, and in some ways, completely removed.

An exhibition at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, “Edward Hopper and The American Hotel”, brings the idea of lodging into immersive art, as the artist’s painting Western Motel has been re-envisioned as a three dimensional motel. Visitors to the museum can book a night (currently sold out, alas), and place themselves in a living work of art that is then viewed by other exhibit goers.

The exhibit, which runs until February, explores the themes of alienation and hospitality in Hopper’s work, both through painting and illustration for trade magazines Hotel Management and Tavern Topics. “Hopper’s spare depictions of familiar public and private spaces are often understood within the contexts of isolation, loneliness, and ennui of early and mid-20th-century America” explains the exhibit website. “As this exhibition shows, however, Hopper’s immersion in the world of hotels, motels, hospitality services, and mobility in general presents a new framework for understanding the artist’s work.” 

What makes Hopper’s work, and this exhibition in particular, is its encapsulation of how a hotel room is both a private space and one that is public — a rented area that has been well traveled by others. Despite attempts by visitors to customize the space to their own desires through candles or scents, pictures of loved ones, or even something as simple as alarm clocks or lighting preferences, the space gets reset each time by housekeeping in a never-ending cycle, just in time for the next guest to enter the space anew.

The viewing experience of the hotel room is also a fascinating idea: that a lived space is one that is subject to the public eye. Some well-publicized hoteliers are seizing on the idea of the hotel as live-streamed reality television, albeit to questionable success, such as the recent offer by one Japanese ryokan. The One-Dollar Hotel has a room fixed at a rate of 1 USD, as long as the occupant is willing to be live-streamed on the hotel’s YouTube channel — an offer that The Washington Post said was working in terms of publicity, but perhaps a little shy on room reservations. 

The Hopper hotel, on the other hand, takes the idea of exhibitionism one step further. By literally immersing themselves in a defined work of art, visitors to the Hopper exhibit hotel often take selfies and other posed shots to capture the experience, which is then shared via social media as a transformed version of a famous piece of artwork. Similar to the “pics or it didn’t happen” mentality of modern travel, in a way, the nature of this sharing of experience transcends the actual experience itself — a paradox commented on by writer Margaret Bower-Dry in The New York Times when she spent exhaustive efforts to travel to the exhibit and spend the night. “I set my phone’s photo timer and snapped a few pictures of myself posed as the painting’s sitter. As I prepared to post the winner to Instagram, my own wave of ambivalence washed over,” she wrote. “In that moment, I was spending more energy capturing the perfect shot than experiencing the place I’d traveled to see. Alienation, indeed.”

To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, Canadian media theorist and groovy thinker, perhaps the medium is the hotel, after all.