Hotel Art – Meet An Art World Matchmaker
She provides private collections, hotels and other businesses with paintings, prints, and photography.

By Tom Gorman Las Vegas Sun May 21, 2009

Carol Spiegel owns an art consultancy company that helps clients fill walls with paintings and prints. She leaves the actual hanging, though, to other professionals. Carol Spiegel loves art galleries. She used to own one.

Today, she’s got thousands of galleries around the country — a few dozen paintings here, a dozen there. At the Bellagio Spa Tower, for instance, she arranged for 20 originals — and 600 prints made from them — to hang in 48 suites. They’re displayed above beds, in the bathrooms, next to the armoires, in the living rooms, a dozen or so pieces per suite. (Ka-ching.)

Spiegel is an art pusher, a kind of matchmaker between emerging artists and the people who want to buy dozens, or hundreds, of paintings and prints at a time. Think doctors’ offices, executive suites, cruise ships, corporate lobbies, conference rooms and hotels. Lots of hotels.

Spiegel, a New Yorker who moved to Summerlin 12 years ago via Southern California, owns The Art Group, an art consultancy company. You’ve got walls? She’s got paintings — original works that artists have turned over to her on consignment, including fine art, limited editions, sculpture, murals, and photography.

Clients — or their designers or architects — show her the color schemes of the rooms that will be decorated — the walls, trim work, wall coverings, furniture, upholstery, carpeting, tile. She matches them with paintings by artists she represents (colorful, generic abstracts are the most popular). If the client likes them and they’re within the budget, a deal is struck (and if there are a lot of rooms to fill, such as a hotel, the client also buys the right to make prints off them).

The most challenging clients to deal with, she says, are law firms. “Lawyers can’t agree,” she says. “You sit in a board room showing the art to five or six different partners, and each one thinks he’s very important and his opinion is the most important opinion in the room. That can be difficult.” On those occasions, she suggests that the office manager and the managing partner work with her to make the decisions. “And then we come back with a big presentation for the other partners and they say, ‘That’s not what I would chose.’ So you just start again. It takes a lot of patience.” In this particular case, the paintings were too abstract. “In the end, we did a combination of softer abstracts and transitionals,” with the partners hanging what they most liked in their own offices.

Spiegel doesn’t hang the paintings and prints; there are companies that specialize in installing them (and, in the case of hotels, hanging them so securely that they can’t be lifted off the walls by wannabe art collectors without taking the walls with them). Hanging paintings is another skill set. Hotels tend to have templates — how high to hang it above the bed, the desk, the toilet.

Mission Statement
The ART Group is committed to helping our clients articulate an aspect of themselves – their personality, brand, corporate identity, or image through the power of contemporary art. Our philosophy, drawn from 20 years of experience, is based on understanding who our clients are, their values, objectives and goals. It is our ability to integrate the universal language of art with the unique essence of our clients that has long distinguished us as an innovator in the area of art sales and representation.

Our Approach
Unlike our competitors, The ART Group understands the hospitality and corporate art space from both a broad and deep perspective. Our approach involves in-depth interviews with company principles, architectural firms and designers so that we can then define goals, and interpret themes and styles. Because our client’s time is valuable, The ART Group pre-selects various works for consideration often in the environment in which they will be permanently placed.

http://www.theartgroupllc.com

Johan (Sweden