Art bought after the interiors are done can only decorate them.

An operator who asks for an art programme usually means one of three things. It may be a collection the house owns and can programme, or works made for the rooms they will stand in. Or it may be a supply of objects to fill a list of walls by an opening date. The first two are a programme. The third is procurement, done well by people who do only that, and ArtisDomus does not take it on.

Published by ArtisDomus, written by Polina Surina.

A club or a hotel usually has three parties. There is the owner of the asset, an operator running it under a management agreement, and a brand whose name is on the door. They are often three different legal entities with different time horizons. The operator can change and the brand can leave. The works stay with their owner, who pays to insure and maintain them for as long as they own them.

This first decision is cheap to make and expensive to leave open. The engagement letter must settle six things before anyone looks at a single work.

ArtisDomus’s own rules apply here directly. It takes no commission from a seller in any form and no resale brokerage. It turns down any engagement where the reputational position cannot be examined. For a club, that last rule covers the membership offer and the brand the house will carry, as well as the sellers it buys from. The full list of refusals is public. What a contract with an art advisor should say about commissions and disclosure sets out the clauses.

This is the core difference between a club and a hotel, and it is a difference in kind. A member comes back, sees the same works again and again, and will in time resent anything that was only ever a first impression. You can programme for that audience: a rotation, a commission that arrives after the opening, a reason to look again, a talk in the room where the work is. A hotel guest sees a room once and photographs it. There the work must do its whole job at first sight, and survive being reproduced by people who never asked.

Reproduction is where hospitality programmes most often find they own less than they thought. Paying for a work buys the object alone. In the United Kingdom the author is the first owner of copyright, even when the work is commissioned. In France the author owns the rights from creation, the commission leaves that untouched, and the buyer of the object acquires none of the rights. A licence must be in writing and name each use. The uses include the house’s own website, the brand’s channels, press, members’ communications and signage. They also include any use by a third party, such as a magazine or a listing site. Each is a separate use, and a licence that says “marketing” names none of them.

Who owns copyright in a commissioned artwork sets out both positions, with moral rights. In France these are perpetual and inalienable, and cannot be bought out at all.

One rule is fixed. ArtisDomus does not photograph private clubs or private collections for publication. It writes about an engagement only with written permission naming that engagement. This rule binds ArtisDomus alone.

Six documents carry a hospitality programme. Write them in this order, since each builds on the one before.

The third document has the law behind it. Read When a commissioned work disappoints before signing one. A work that fails its specification is a breach; disliking the result is not. So the specification is your whole remedy, and it should be written by someone who expects to rely on it. Insuring and cataloguing a collection split across two countries sets out what the record must contain.

Clubs and hotels often occupy old buildings, and an old building can be protected by a third body, separate from the landlord and the planning authority. In Malta no works of any kind may be carried out on a scheduled property without permission. The Superintendence of Cultural Heritage is a statutory consultee and writes conditions. A property can be scheduled after a scheme has already started. The exemption for interior work is narrower than it sounds and has a condition attached.

For a programme, the lesson is about order. If a fixing detail is refused at the end, the work cannot be installed, and a commission built for that position has nowhere to go. Ask the consents question when the positions are chosen, well before the crates arrive.

An art programme in a listed building in Malta covers the two consents, the third consent for conservation and restoration, and the penalties. If works are bought in Malta, the cash limit binds the buyer as much as the dealer and adds linked transactions together.