As general manager of New York's Gramercy Park Hotel, Elizabeth Mao appreciates her job from the moment she walks in the door each day. "What I love most is that every morning I am greeted by the bright smiles of our doormen, and I walk into our stunning lobby with a crackling fire and original works by Damien Hirst, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Fernando Botero," she says. "What could be better than that?"

There's something to be said about surrounding yourself with great works of art. Take advantage of the fact that more and more hotels understand this, and are eschewing the generic sunset watercolor that's long been a hotel staple, for more refined pieces. Here are the top five hotels who take art seriously. 

Back in 2006, when Ian Schrager reopened New York's Gramercy Park Hotel to much acclaim and a parade of celebrity guests, he left behind the specters of the former owners, the Weissberg family, whose string of tragedies culminated in scion David jumping from the roof to his death. Now Schrager, who still casts an apparitional shadow over his many previous ventures, has moved on, leaving the hotel to find a way forward on its own considerable merits. Hoping to get an inside take on the future of the Gramercy, I caught up with GM Scott Koster on a recent afternoon in the Rose Bar, which, it must be said, looks startlingly different at 3pm than it does at 3am.

Hotels must offer guests not only the best hospitality money can buy, but the best technology on the market, too. Hotels shape a neighborhood -- so their Twitter accounts should interact with life beyond the lobby (and with the Twitter Universe, of course). Whether offering discounts on hotel suites, an extra hotel help-line, or party-crashing pictures, these New York-based hotel Twitter accounts are a few of our favorite follows.

A simple postage stamp-size photo of a hotel room cannot possibly forecast the sort of experience you'll actually have there. What sorts of treasures, sights, and smells lie within and around the hotel? It's about the neighborhood. The food. The lighting. And in the case of the Gramercy Park Hotel, the people and the wonderful, old world opulence and glamor represented in its every detail. From the velvet curtains and the outsize art in its massive hall, to its historical block and landscaped grounds, here's a snapshot of Gramercy Park's finest offerings.

Only during Fashion Week do you see industry folk bright-eyed and dressed to the nines on sub-zero, it's-so-early-it's-still-dark-out weekend mornings -- all in spite of hard-partying the night before. You can catch them dashing like trained athletes between shows at Lincoln Center, Milk Studios, and various other obscure venues for hours on end, fueled by copious amounts of caffeinated beverages (sometimes spiked – I mean, who's really that chipper in the am?).

Last night, at Casa Tanteo in Soho, two mixologists went head-to-head in a boozy battle for the tequila brand’s popular “Mexican Standoff” series. Kevin Denton of The Roof Top at Gramercy Park Hotel and Ben Demarchelier of L'oubli were put to the test behind the bar, where they whipped up drinks for a panel of judges that included Tanteo’s in-house mixologist Jason Mendenhall, Johnny Swet of Hotel Griffou, James Jung of NBC’s The Feast, Renee Lucas of CITY magazine, and CBS Sunday Morning correspondent Serena Altschul.

It's fitting that in the perversely brilliant 2008 flick In Bruges, Colin Farrell's tortured hitman Ray finally wallops an uptight Canadian who's whining on about the plumes of cigarette smoke Ray's Belgian date, Chloe (Clemence Poesy), is blowing in his general direction, even though they're sitting in the smoking section of a restaurant. While smoking bans are being gleefully and sternly enacted and enforced across the Western world (most vigorously in a New York City, which feels more like Los Angeles every day), a constitutional court in Belgium overturned that country's ban - and it won't even be addressed again until at least 2014.

On the Cool Jobs list, Scott Lipps nears the top - somewhere between shortstop for the New York Yankees and President of the U.S. of A. As president of One Management, he guides the careers of some of the most beautiful and interesting people in the world, while still finding the time to be a rock-and-roll drummer and go out most nights. He's sought-after by every party promoter and club owner in town. Every joint wants him (or at least the people he manages) to show up. We’ve been nodding hellos to each other across rooms for years, so it was nice to finally sit down and get to know him.

The last time I was at Rose Bar, I explained to my friends Nick and Garrett, it was for an installment of Nur Khan's Rose Bar Sessions—for Rufus Wainwright— and I ended up passing out early. Okay, so the correct way to say it would be that I blacked out early, waking up on the bathroom floor—my bathroom floor, thank goodness. The same thing happened the time before, when I'd stopped in for a "relaxing" post-work cocktail. Rose Bar is like that: one minute you're discussing the merits of black coffee with Penn Badgley, the next your walking around in circles in the night air. It's as if the place is filled with fun house mirrors that distort reality and fool you into thinking you're extremely elegant as you slide down a slippery, wine-drenched slope. Maybe it's because you feel like you're part of the ambiance, and under the Keith Haring art, the elegance is vodka-proof. A fortress of refinement. Last night, we were in the front bar, curled over a candle-lit table debating the enduring mysticism of the place as Tony Danza strolled by with Alan Cumming. Maybe spotting Tony Micelli wasn't out of the ordinary, considering we'd just enjoyed a show put on by Liza Minnelli herself, kicking off the fall season of Monday Rose Bar Sessions.