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Standard Hotel Launches New Video Art Series

by Ian Volner | Monday, June 27, 2011 | 3 Comments

Terence Koh "Rabbit Holy Days"

It’s not every hotel that brings avant-garde video art to its guest suites and public spaces. Of course, it’s not every hotel guest that expects that particular service to be provided along with their After Eight mints and complimentary mini-soaps.

But patrons of New York’s The Standard Hotel are rather a unique and self-selecting crowd, and hotelier Andre Balázs knows how to cater to them: he launched StandART, a series of specially-commissioned pieces by prominent contemporary artists available for in-room television viewing. The hotel debuted this year’s selection of seven new videos at a private event in the Top of the Standard’s Boom Boom Room, high above the High Line park in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District.

Allison Schulnik's "Forest"

The 2011 lineup features, among others, the work of Terence Koh, whose “Rabbit Holy Days” follows a couple of lovable lop-ears as they pursue romance and adventure through the corridors of The Standard; Slater Bradley, whose “The Abandonments” presents a loopy tour of Roosevelt Island by way of Willy Wonka and “A Clockword Orange;” and Kalup Linzy, the emerging art-world darling and purported muse to the omnipresent James Franco, represented here by a pair of mock-melodramatic music videos on themes of love and transvestism. Linzy was the star attraction at the launch event this week, crooning a song of (assumedly) his own creation, with a full funk-soul band and the Manhattan skyline behind him.

All the videos will be on display at The Standard’s branches in New York, Miami, and its two Los Angeles locations.

Naomi Fisher's "Myakka"

Images courtesy of Standard Hotels.