Felix Salmon submits:

It used to be that artisans would provide a service. A gentleman would stay at his hotel, get fitted for a suit at his tailor, and maybe buy a painting from his art dealer. Nowadays, it seems, our gentleman has become a consumer: he doesn't buy what he wants, so much as what he is sold. And he's not being sold a hotel room, or a suit, or a painting, so much as a lifestyle. The luxury industry exists to sell him that lifestyle, in all its myriad guises.

In a parallel development, things like villas and paintings used to be much simpler propositions than they are today: our gentleman would buy them, and enjoy them, and that was more or less the end of the story. Nowadays, they are assets, with a value which can go up or down – and, increasingly, they're being asked to generate revenue, to boot.

At the nexus of all this is the Byblos Art Hotel, in the Villa Amistà, in the small village of Corrubbio outside Verona.

The art hotel as a concept, of course, is nothing new: a Google search on "art hotel" comes up with well over a million results, and anybody can call themselves an Art Hotel if they're so minded. Most of the time, a hotelier takes an unexceptional property, tarts it up with primary colors and some vaguely avant-garde design elements (Philippe Starck is the default), and gets a bunch of his artist friends to provide interesting décor and a Unique Selling Point which can distinguish the hotel from its blandly corporate competitors.

The end result is generally very disappointing: an overhyped hotel with too-small rooms and staff wearing black who generally look great but provide less than stellar service. What's more, after a couple of years of use, the trendy furnishings – which were designed for residential, not hotel, use – become battered and tatty, and the hotel, which has long since lost whatever buzz it had when it openened, finds itself unwilling or unable to spend the money needed to replace them. Eventually, the property is sold to another hotelier, who embarks upon a wholesale rebranding effort, and the cycle begins anew.

The Byblos Art Hotel might seem similar at first glance, but it operates at a much higher level – it's a bona fide five-star hotel, with excellent service and not a hint of tattiness, despite being open now for two years. Yes, the villa in which it is located is a long way from anywhere, which means that if you wanted to turn it into a hotel, you'd pretty much have to put some art in or provide some other reason for people to want to stay in Corrubbio. But the art here is household-name stuff, and seriously valuable.

Entering the main lobby, there's a whole series of Vanessa Beecroft photographs as well as an Anish Kapoor installation. Check-in takes place in front of a Sol LeWitt; the "internet access point" is in a room of Cindy Shermans; the restaurant has a whole series of Sandro Chias; and the bar is actually Peter Halley's Bar, with two of his paintings. And there's lots more where they came from.

The mix of artists is decidedly eclectic, but two themes do emerge. One is that the work is all very new: the LeWitt and the Shermans, for instance, are of the more-recent-and-less-good kind than the art which made them famous. And the second is that there's a large amount of female nudity: not just in the Beecrofts, but in everything from Marina Abramowicz to Takashi Murakami as well. Even the Shermans feature the artist wearing large fake breasts. And on top of that are the frescoes in the sauna...

The owner of the hotel is the owner of the Byblos Art Gallery, in Verona, and of course is also the owner of the Byblos fashion line. Each arm of the empire adds luster to the next and burnishes the overall brand. Yet at the same time, there's a slightly forced and superficial feeling to the whole enterprise. The artists are, almost without exception, showy: they look impressive, they're easily recognizable, they have famous names. They serve, in other words, not as art, so much as a mechanism for hotel guests to congratulate themselves on their sophistication. This is a personal collection, but it's a collection of art brands more than it is the result of an individual's unique and idiosyncratic vision.

On the other hand, I'd happily come back and stay at this hotel again: the branding and salesmanship worked on me. The villa and the grounds are lovely, and I'm fascinated to see how the corridor devoted to international street/graffiti artists is going to develop over time. The hotel is chock-full of striking design and visual treats, which make a visit much more fun and interesting than most hotel stays.

And so it seems that here, at least, art is beginning to generate income. One of the main reasons why art isn't an investment is that it has negative carry: it pays no coupons or dividends, while the cost of insuring it is reasonably large, and the market in lent-out paintings is tiny indeed. At the Byblos Art Hotel, however, total income is certainly much higher for the presence of all the art. Maybe other collectors will find themselves opening Art Hotels in the future, just in an attempt to offset the costs of maintaining their collection.