The Devil's Buttocks: the worst hotel art in the world. WARNING: photographs follow.

Don’t ever let anyone tell you ‘it could be worse’, because sometimes it can’t be. Or, if it could, it is already so bad that degrees of badness are meaningless: think of the cold war when a global nuclear arsenal capable of vaporising the world 100 times was really no worse then once capable of vaporising it once.

         So, sometimes it couldn’t be worse. I know, because currently I’m staring at a case in point. Hotel art so bad it rendered me sleepless and shuddering.

        

The Devil's Buttocks.

Why is it that hoteliers so often take a comfortable and functional apartment and render it almost uninhabitable by adding vomitus objects to the wall. It happens everywhere. Bedrooms discomforted by some black brooding vision, kitchenettes and lounge rooms scourged by crude geometric swipes or exuberant feacal festivals of muck.

         I hear you. ‘It could be worse.’ Well, today I’d like to share with you what may well be the world’s worst example of shit masquerading as art.

Let me set the scene. I am in a comfortable apartment in a pleasant regional community. I am here because the court has come to town and my role is to represent poor citizens charged with criminal offences. I speak to judge and jurors by day and retreat to my apartment at night: to eat, wash, read statements, consider exhibits, research law and draft arguments and jury addresses. That was the plan anyway. The apartment is cursed, such that I am as likely to be curled on the floor convulsing, as I am to be drafting closing arguments. It’s the artwork you see. Or more correcting the strange coloured, odd shaped and textured objects that are affixed to the wall. Wallwank of the highest order.

Disturbing.

I have included photographs which I took by holding the camera at arms length and squinting so as to minimise exposure to the mess. If you are strong-stomached then take a look. For those of you of fragile constitution I give you this description.

They are square or long and thin, offending the rule of thirds and they pop off the wall by over an inch. The images are lines, by and large, mostly straight but one offensively curved like a green devil’s arse sat in stew. The shapes represent nothing at all, are not pleasing to the eye and have no fathomable purpose beyond inducing illness. The colours, if you can call them that, are the foul illegitimate love-children of puce, syphilitic green and jaundice yellow. The shapes and colour are thrown together like discordant slaps. One long green piece located above the bed is particularly disturbing. As if to emphasis the works’ failure, one is defaced by black circles as if a teacher has highlighted some error but died before scrawling the word ‘shit’ on its surface.

Missing only an arrow and the word 'shit'.

How have I survived in the company of such evil? I wont pretend it is easy but I’ve managed by working late at a solicitor’s office, eating out and encouraging sleep with alcohol and anti-anxiety medication. One more week to go. I think I can make it. I think I can ….