Bad Art – Why We (A/O) Do What We Do

It was a dry San Jose summer afternoon, I was settling into the conference room for a client pitch (this was back in my ad agency days). The temperature outside read 98 degrees, while inside, everything from the AC to the sad grey-beige walls to the pallid cast of fluorescent overhead lights said dentist office in post-communist Siberia. As I took in my surroundings, I was hit with two thoughts in quick succession: first, how can a company whose brand identity was built on out-of-the-box thinking force their brightest minds to work in the equivalent of an idea morgue? And second, who made the decisions about what goes on these walls?

Because directly in front of me were three posters. Let's call them… “specimens”.

Specimen 1: an illustrated step-by-step guide to the Heimlich Maneuver. Many questions arose, but why is this in a conference room, was the most pressing. Specimen 2: framed "Teamwork" motivational poster: a faded overhead shot of rowers in a boat, hanging slightly askew, as if even it had given up. And, last but not least, was Specimen 3, a violent motif of primary colored, semi-abstract clowns playing trumpets.

At this point, one must draw conclusions. Perhaps someone, overcome with feeling after gazing upon the clowns, had made the space a choking hazard. The team, working together to resuscitate their colleague, would then need both the instructional chart and the motivational reminder. Clearly, I was overthinking it.

The pitch went ahead as planned. But after closing remarks and next steps, I couldn't help myself: "This might sound odd, but what's up with the posters in here?"

What came next was genuinely eye-opening. My clients explained that they barely used the space. Most of their meetings and creative brainstorming happened in the dining area. Nobody actually liked being in the conference room, and the posters were off-putting, but no one bothered to change them. Even though the team had more square footage, better technology, projection screens, Eames chairs, and a polished oak conference table, they actively avoided it anyway, without ever quite knowing why [editors note: the clowns were at least half the problem].

I had just begun studying eastern design philosophy and neuroaesthetics. My alarm bells went off.

This room had high ceilings, beautiful light, and every material condition for great thinking and collaboration. But unfortunately, it had been reduced to an afterthought, avoided by the very people it was built for — because someone, somewhere, decided that a room is just a room. That the walls are just walls. That the art doesn't matter.

That afternoon didn't change what I thought about art. It changed how I saw the role of art in our everyday lives.

A room is never just a room. It's a system, one that's either working for the people inside it or quietly working against them. The wrong visual environment doesn't announce itself. It just creates a low-level resistance, a reason you'd rather be somewhere else, a meeting that ends a little flat. And because no one can name it, no one fixes it. That conference room had every element of a great creative space — and nobody wanted to be in it. The result was a $50,000 table that no one wanted to sit at.

That story isn't rare. It's in the office where the energy is inexplicably off, the home where a room never quite feels like yours, the lobby that projects the opposite of what the brand intends. It’s that unmistakeable, uncomfortable feeling of every space where the art was chosen by default, by obligation, or not chosen at all.

What surrounds us shapes how we think, how we collaborate, how we see ourselves and each other.

Someone has to ask the question about what's on the walls. We decided it should be us.