January 2003 The idea of choosing hotels as a theme for a show is intriguing because of the numerous associations that it raises: urbanism, mobility, business, environment, fantasy. This exhibit covers a lot of ground, including a historical section, another dedicated to new concepts in hotels, and one to works of art that celebrate, critique or satirize hotel culture. The most engaging and imaginative space is without contest the floor occupied by artists, with some pieces commissioned for the show. Many could be cited. Those that struck my imagination were “Private Dancer” by Toland Grinnell, a travel trunk that doubles up as dancing floor and discotheque; Adam Dade and Sonya Hanney's hilarious “Stacked Hotel Room #9” – the artists, behind closed doors, dismantle and stack up all of the room’s contents and document their activities before putting the room back in order; and Sophie Calle's classic “The Hotel” (1983) where she recounts her experience as a maid in a Venetian Hotel through photographs and obsessive-voyeuristic accounts of peoples’ suitcases, drawers and purse contents . As an environment, my favorite was the interpretation by Jeff Gompertz of one of the “Capsule Hotel Units” that surfaced in Japan in the late 1970s: a sleeping compartment with a closed-video circuit and the soundtrack of the story of his travels as told to his daughter by a Japanese businessman: Take your shoes off, step into the comfortable but claustrophobic space and lie down- in the words of two visitors to New York whom I met in the show “it is like a submarine.” On the ground floor, like many other visitors that day, I was frustrated by the “Hotel Proforma” presentation, where supposedly every room is a performance space. No such luck – it is a potential performance space that has every appearance of interactivity but is impossible to activate : just a prototype. A well-researched documentation on recently built hotels and another on exceptional hotels such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, The Savoy in London, the Americana in Bal Arbor, Florida and the Waldorf-Astoria in New York will mostly appeal to professional architects and designers, and art historians more seriously bent than myself as well as the cognoscenti. This uneven, sometimes bizarre but mostly challenging exhibit has the added bonus of being held in one of my favorite New York museums, the National Academy of Design. I will remember the ground-floor conservatory: as I walked in its silence, it was touched by a rapidly changing wintery white light. Gaetano Pesce’s bathroom table, an enormous black polyurethane foot cut at the ankle, rested under the glass dome, an objet trouvé within a lush tropical forest. An added bonus to the visit is the hallway exhibit of Frederick Church’s eight small oils, a fraction of the more than 2,000 works from his Olana house recently bequested by his son to the Cooper-Hewitt Museum. The light of these snowy landscapes followed me into Manhattan’s streets. -- Carole Naggar "New Hotel for Global Nomads" is on view at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum 2 east 91st Street New York, NY 10128 Until March 2, 2003. www.si.edu/ndm