Now That We’re Paying For It, Can We Touch The Art

            When we ran a piece about art hotels recently, a publicist (I assume) from a hotel in Louisville, my former hometown, wrote to make sure we knew about the art hotel there.  He or she wanted us to know that theirs was not one of those phony, faux-bohemian art hotels I was ridiculing, but rather an authentic, one-of-a-kind, honest-to-goodness art hotel.
            Well, of course they all say that.  The publicist didn’t seem to get the point of my piece.  I wasn’t making fun of these places because they claim to be phony Chelsea Hotels, with their art admittedly dumbed down for the masses.  I was making fun of them because they claim to be the real deal.
            The hotel in question is called, in a supreme flight of imaginative brainstorming, 21C Museum Hotel, and the name itself tells you pretty much all you need to know about the place: there will be art of some sort in the lobby, and in the restaurant, and much cheaper art in the rooms.
            The June issue of Travel + Leisure Magazine included an instructive article that discussed the funding of the hotel and it tipped me off to what may be driving this new trend.  Basically, if you call your business a “museum,” that means it’s a charitable institution of some sort, right?  Now I’m no expert on such things, but it seems that, somehow or other, the financial risk involved in starting such a “business” is bound to be considerably lessened, probably at tax-payer expense.
            So, after all, maybe it’s less consumer demand than “owner demand” that’s at work here.  Judging from the number of starving artists living in the Chelsea, I didn’t think that there were that many people actually interested in art. 
            The owner of the 21C is a guy named Steve Wilson, described as a philanthropist and art collector.  He and his wife, Laura Lee Brown—whose family sells liquor—have apparently donated their Ten-million dollar art collection to the hotel, er, museum.  Usually, when rich people donate art to museums, they write it off on their taxes.  Though the article makes it hard to tell if that’s what’s happening here, it does say that, “Historic preservation tax credits helped offset some of the cost, and the city pitched in a $1.7 million starter grant.”
            I think our illustrious proprietor, Stanley Bard, would be well advised look into this angle.  Change the name of this place to the Chelsea Museum and we’re in business!  Or out of business.  Whatever.  And then he can give us a break on our rent!
            Anyway, this 21C hotel scam is part of Louisville’s latest efforts to revitalize its downtown ghost town.  In the seventies they had the River City Mall, then in the eighties they had the Galleria, and now it’s the Cast Iron District, or whatever they call it.  The first two schemes worked for awhile and then the novelty wore off, and the latest scheme is doomed to end up the same.  Revitalization, if it ever comes, is going to come from the bottom up, with people of all income levels living and working downtown.  They should have given Wilson $1.7 million to start an all-night deli. (Check out the cutting edge performance art.) Ed Hamilton