At the Vancouver Art Gallery until September 15

Remember that old academic adage: a master’s thesis is nothing about everything and a doctoral dissertation is everything about nothing? Well, I’m not saying that hotels are nothing—far from it. As Grand Hotel demonstrates, they’re fascinating indicators of cultural trends and values. It’s just that viewing this ambitious new exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery is like walking through a lengthy dissertation. It’s comprehensively researched, carefully structured, intellectually reasoned, and smartly written, but there’s way too much information here. Too many labels and text panels and archival materials and didactic diagrams. And while we’re given lots of visuals, moving and still, they read as instruction rather than art. Most of the images seem to be illustrating the theme rather than driving it.

The show’s individual components are beautifully designed but the whole is awkwardly laid out, occupying all of the VAG’s second floor, where it starts, and half of the first, where it ends. Grand Hotel grew out of a master’s thesis in architecture by the gifted, California-based writer and curator Jennifer Volland, and has been expansively developed by her and the VAG’s Bruce Grenville and Stephanie Rebick. The title is borrowed from the landmark 1932 movie directed by Edmund Goulding and, yes, it’s the film in which Greta Garbo utters her famously world-weary line “I want to be alone.” Set in Berlin, the movie employs a luxury hotel as a microcosm where characters and narratives intersect and diverge.

As VAG director Kathleen Bartels said at the media preview, the exhibition examines the hotel as a “site of social interaction and cultural production”. It also looks at the historical, geopolitical, psychological, and design factors that have contributed to the evolution of the modern hotel. An intriguing example of geopolitics is the Cold War role Conrad Hilton sought to play, in concert with the U.S. State Department, in fighting communism by building distinctively American hotels in “strategic international locations” such as Istanbul, Berlin, and Tehran. After reading this text-panel information, it was hard to suppress a little experience of schadenfreude when later encountering a 1959 photograph of Fidel Castro standing triumphantly on a balcony of the Hilton Hotel in Havana after he had overthrown the U.S.–supported dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. Symbolic, indeed.

The show’s Design section demonstrates the integration of all aspects of hotel presentation, from exterior architecture to furniture, cutlery, soap bars, and matchboxes. This section also includes highly detailed architectural models of 10 legendary hotels, historic and contemporary. The buildings represented range from the colonial Raffles Hotel in Singapore to the über-modernist SAS Royal Copenhagen in Denmark to the postmodernly fantastical Marina Bay Sands, in Singapore again. Once more, the history, economics, politics, and design of these hotels are fascinating, but the models, somehow, don’t evoke their essence—at least, not for me. I love being in well-designed hotels, from the new and elegant to the old and funky, but I derive no pleasure from looking at architectural models, no matter how skillfully crafted they are. This is probably a personal quirk—many visitors will enjoy them—but I find them as distant and uninvolving as dollhouses and miniature train sets.

With its multitude of experimental films and videos, Culture is the most frenetic section of the show. It is also the most engaging, despite the archival nature of its many displays of open books and album covers. This is probably because, in addressing the hotel as a “site of cultural production”, this aspect of Grand Hotel speaks to our interest in artists, writers, filmmakers, and musicians. By aligning the names of hotels such as the Chelsea in Manhattan, the Beat in Paris, and the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles with the accomplishments of such 20th-century legends as Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Jim Morrison, the show makes an immediate connection with the viewer. The cult of personality? Probably—but it works.

Supplementing the exhibition are a blog site and a big, handsome, hardcover book, also titled Grand Hotel. The engrossing print publication is filled with dozens of texts by a disparate group of writers and scholars, past and present. It also reproduces a truly fascinating array of photographs, postcards, brochures, and posters, in a more compressed and less foot-wearying fashion than the show does. Again, I wish Grand Hotel, the exhibition, had given greater play to visual art and less to verbal explication. Where text is concerned, a book in the hand is worth two on the wall.