The Benign Comedy by Candace Opper

While undergoing radiation therapy for colon cancer, my mother spent several months residing in a hotel owned by the well-known hospital where she was receiving treatment. To keep rates affordable, the hotel was necessarily bare bones—the front desk staff only worked 9-5, there was no room service or morning coffee, the business and fitness center constituted one small room featuring a printer, a treadmill, and a couple kettlebells. It was really less of a hotel than a series of furnished one-bedroom apartments with a couple friendly housekeepers who changed sheets twice a week. 

The hotel’s decor was equally basic—lots of tan and beige, some fake plastic plants. The long hallway that led to my mother’s room was lined with a series of landscapes printed on canvas, most featuring a tree or two rendered in a different subdued color palette than the canvas ten feet down the hall. This lack of color and personality bummed me out on my mother’s behalf; a person who has historically filled her life with radiance and dazzle and vivid hues, she was temporarily relegated to the land of the unremarkable.

Choosing relatively unimaginative art prints likely has something to do with the hotel’s budget, but I wonder if choices like these are also tied to the desire not to offend anyone. “Offend” doesn’t necessarily nod to provocative content; art can also offend with color, shape, tone, or a degree of abstraction that prompts the viewer to feel as though they don’t “get” the artwork, thus inspiring frustration or anger. In the process of offending no one, however, these pieces risk arousing no feelings at all. 

Maybe that’s the point, especially in a hotel where the artwork selection is the least of the guests’ concerns. But generic, polite art is an epidemic that has taken over lots of spaces, (especially since box stores got into the art print game). I spend the duration of every teeth cleaning staring at a landscape that is equally as uninspiring as the easy listening station piping through the speakers. Is it that these cultural objects aren’t meant for me? Or is it that, in their relative inoffensiveness, they’re essentially meant for no one? 

“Choosing relatively unimaginative art prints likely has something to do with the hotel’s budget, but I wonder if choices like these are also tied to the desire not to offend anyone.”

I think often of a public art installation located in the parking lot of a massive strip mall near where I grew up: a series of vintage cars parked near the edge of the lot, covered entirely in black asphalt. My mother referred to them as the “tar cars” and, when I asked, explained that this is what would happen to our car if we shopped at the plaza too long (I later confirmed she wasn’t the only mother to tell this lie). As a kid, I found the tar cars to be haunting and fascinating, an unforgettable sliver of weirdness hanging over the otherwise mundane aesthetic of a suburban strip mall. I had never seen anything like it.

The tar cars are actually called Ghost Parking Lot, created in 1977 by an architecture and environmental arts organization called SITE. Led by architect James Wines, SITE buried twenty cars in asphalt, varying coverage from some exposure of body contours to full envelopment. “Contrary to the prevalent use of ‘object art’ as a decorative accessory to buildings and public spaces,” writes SITE, “this fusion of typically mobile artifacts with their environment takes advantage of people’s subliminal connections with the rituals of shopping center merchandising and the fetishism of American car culture.” The plaza’s owner—also an art collector—commissioned the piece from Wines, wanting to drive more traffic to the plaza, which had been in decline since the 1950s. 

Shop owners and visitors had mixed feelings about the piece. One local resident described it as a “depressing sight” that makes a “terrible impression” on those visiting the town for the first time. “It grows on you,” another local contested. “When you really take a look at it, you realize it's Americana—this country was built on cars.” Either way, after the piece was installed, some of the plaza’s stores reported a 40% increase in business. The owner took a risk that ruffled some feathers but in the end benefited his business and cultivated a unique artwork that engendered a dynamic public response for twenty-five years.

What would happen if my mother’s hospital hotel or my dentist’s office made riskier artwork choices? Maybe not to the extreme of covering cars in asphalt as a commentary on consumerism, but something that embraced color or experimented with mixed media or, dare I say, made a statement about anything at all. Imagine if the hospital hotel had a series of urban landscapes depicting its own city or a colorful abstract mural in the lobby by a local artist or an array of mixed media collages that endlessly occupy the viewer’s gaze? Worst case scenario, visitors think these are eyesores or don’t “get” them; best case, these pieces provoke thought, inspire joy, ignite curiosity, and leave visitors wanting to return.