Ian McMillan: My fascination with hotel artwork - from Barnsley to Baltimore

Comforted because it’s familiar and I have seen it many, many times before. Slightly bored because it’s familiar and I have seen it many, many times before.

I gaze at the art on the wall; a triptych of flowers in a field, three canvases separated by about an inch of wall. I walk closer to the art and I start to talk about it; no, I start to talk to the art, asking it questions about what it means, about what it’s like to be part of so many people’s lives for so many years.

Of course the artwork doesn’t reply. That would be silly.

I’m not talking randomly to pictures; there’s a microphone in the room held by a radio producer because I’m making an audio documentary about hotel art, something I’ve been interested in for many years because I’ve stayed in hotels for work and pleasure for a long time and I’ve always taken notice of the pictures on the wall and what they might tell us about the aspirations of the artist, of the hotel, and also what they might tell us about us, about who we are now in these turbulent and fragmentary times.

“Let’s do that bit again,” says the producer, as she always does to make the things I say more cohesive and less rambling, “and let’s get more trundle”.

I go out of the room, close the door, open the door, trundle my case in and start to talk again.

The more I’ve been thinking about hotel art, the more interesting the subject is becoming.

There are a couple of different kinds of hotel art, as far as I can make out. There are the pictures reproduced all over the country and indeed all over the world (often in what the cultural historian Roger Luckhurst calls American Monster Hotels) so that each room looks the same whether you’re in Barnsley or Baltimore.

These works have been made by real people, although I guess that artificial intelligence will pose a threat to painty-fingered artists in the future, and their work will be seen by more people than would see it in a gallery.

Whether they look at it in the same way is a different matter, but the pictures certainly get a huge audience, sometimes consisting of people in pyjamas and nighties who are keeping their eye on the football scores on the big flat screen telly on the opposite wall to the artwork.

As well as the picture that’s been reproduced thousands of times across hundreds of hotels, I also looked for this documentary at contemporary art in high-end hotels that sometimes employ artists in residence and in which the art in every room is a one-off, not a copy.

As one art hotel owner said to me, “the art in here is meant to disturb as well as soothe” and it certainly did that, in a very stimulating way.

Put it like this: you wouldn’t be keeping your eye on the football results with some of these powerful and stimulating images in your room. You’d be keeping your eye on the art results.

Time to trundle my case out of the room and trundle it out again, just so that can record the sound of the trundling. “Good trundling, Ian,” my producer says. Yes, it’s a work of art.