It may surprise you to learn you live in a house full of designer things. No, I have not been sneaking round to your homes and replacing this mis-matched crap inside with items from my own impeccable collection because really, I don’t want to know how you people live. It’s because every single consumer good in your house has been designed. From the plastic washing up bowl in your sink to your doorbell camera. They may have been designed thoughtlessly or carelessly . They may have been designed quickly or slowly. Everything you buy to fit into your day-to-day life from the cheapest plastic crap to the most extravagant item had a designer involved in its conception somewhere along the line.
Groceries you absent mindedly chuck in your shopping cart every week are not immune either. The milk in your fridge door. The six-pack of your favored beer. That expensive bottle of fragrance you bought your partner. Packaging designers produced the containers and graphic designers did the labelling. For better or worse design in all its forms surrounds us.
None of it is art, and this is an important distinction to make. Art exists purely to be viewed and understood. Its purpose is to stimulate, start discussions, to be decorative and subjective. Art is what we hang on our walls and install in our public spaces. It has no structure or purpose other than what it says and how it makes us feel – done well it should have meaning and complexity. It doesn’t matter if it’s the Wings of Love by Stephen Pearson or Untitled (Black on Gray) by Mark Rothko – as long as it speaks to you. Art is spontaneous and born from emotion. Design is different. Design is a process born of rationale and a brief: a need to solve a problem. Car design is not art, and car designers are not artists. Describing some cars as art undermines the value regular cars bring to millions of normal people and runs the risk of warping our perception of how we view them as enthusiasts.
Why The Difference Matters
This might sound like a contradiction or even hypocrisy coming from someone who studied at an institution that has the word art in its name, and whose qualifications both end in the letter A for art, but this only happens because of how society categorizes our broader white collar vocations, and car design is a creative process in the same way filmmaking or even fine art is. But it is a creative process bound by very real constraints; the need to create, build and sell a safe, functioning passenger vehicle that is commercially successful. There is an artistic part to it – you have to be able to draw cars and make judgements based on aesthetics. You need the ability to know what works and why and be able to translate that into compelling sketches that sell your ideas and give modelers something to work with.
As a designer I should be able to combine a collection of lines, shapes and surfaces into something that makes pleasing visual sense. This goes for any design discipline – if you don’t have the ability to get your thinking down visually your career won’t progress far. Even the most luscious and evocative car design sketches are not art – because they are in service of the design process, and the only message they convey is what your design looks like and what its function is.
As car enthusiasts If the difference between art and design is not clearly delineated and understood, we run the risk of idolizing certain cars and neglecting others. That’s not to say I do not think car design can be discussed in the same manner as art, because it should be. One of the issues when talking about car design is that it defies easy cultural categorization. You can go and buy books or take courses that will help you understand fine or modern art, architecture, films or literature better. Unless you take a car design degree the same level of understanding is not so readily available. But in the wider world of design the people who instigate, curate and record what is worthy and what is not have always taken a snobby and elitist view towards the proletarian and democratic automobile.
At the risk of undermining my own point I’m going to quote a paragraph from The Art of American Car Design by C. Edson Armi, an American Council of Learned Societies publication (originally published by the Pennsylvania State University Press):
“During and shortly after the war, a group of extraordinarily talented and innovative thinkers at MOMA succeeded in carving out a place for industrial design as a legitimate art within the museum world. Indeed, as director of the Department of Industrial Design, Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., had a tremendously positive influence across the country by selling his own exquisite taste to the American mass market through the museum’s seal of approval, known as the “Good Design” Award. In a peculiar inconsistency, however, the very men who valiantly fought to have industrial design recognized as a legitimate subject of museum study systematically excluded American mass-produced cars from exhibitions of modern design. In the 1991 automobile exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, they indicted the industry by not showing a single American car designed after 1938 and rubbed salt in the wound by including a Jeep as the only model still in production. The museum rejected the contemporary American car and justified that position philosophically. According to Bauhaus principles, mass-produced American cars could not be good design because their form was superficial-that is, not meaningfully related to structure, function, and materials and because the goal in making these cars was innovation and commercial gain rather than slow change toward a perfect type. The American car also lacked a “voice”: No definite theory underpinned it, nor did institutions or magazines fight for it the way they argued the success of American painting and industrial design at the time.”
The bottom line of the argument here is simply cars do not adhere to a predetermined set of design and cultural ideals that have been specifically selected to exclude them. Other consumer products are worthy of being recognized as being well designed, but the humble automobile is not. This gatekeeping is problematic for a couple of reasons, not least the fact the Bauhaus didn’t have anything to do with cars although some of its principles are relevant. But the Bauhaus set the foundations for Modernism which was a movement dedicated to improving lives through rational design, and in the latter part of the twentieth century in that regard the car did far more for humanity than any Wassily bloody Chair did.
I saw this elitism in action firsthand while I was a student at the Royal College of Art. The organizing committee of the graduation show wanted to prevent the Vehicle Design course displaying their final projects in the main exhibition spaces. We were to banished upstairs out of sight in our studio space, where we would not attract anything like as much footfall. As the student representative for our course I had a lot to say about that in my own forthright and charming manner. After the event I found out the head of the program had been calling me ‘Red Robbo’ behind my back. He meant it as an insult – I took it as a compliment. After I left the Vehicle Design masters was renamed ‘Intelligent Mobility’. Names are important.
Cars Are Worthy Of Debate On Merits Other Than Their Appearance
While cars or any consumer good cannot and should not be considered art, cars are worthy of similar critical discussion in the same manner. Cars are everywhere which means everyone has an opinion; sheer ubiquity pushes them into the discourse, which is why I started writing in the first place. I wasn’t interested in regurgitating press releases about car design like the specialist websites do or spewing out cod-intellectual word spaghetti that makes you go cross eyed when you try to read it. As a car designer and importantly as a car enthusiast I wanted to write for the mainstream audience, because automotive media was woefully under serving enthusiasts knowledgeable, intelligent and accessible discussions about what car designers do, how the whole thing works and what makes good car design and what doesn’t. Call me egotistical but my hope is to nudge those opinions in a more enlightened direction.
Part of the issue is the continuing consensus that no great looking cars are designed anymore. Cars have become soulless appliances with badges being the only way of telling them apart. This isn’t a new argument – thirty five years ago European car magazines were making much the same point about incoming Japanese imports. It is of course a load of utter bollocks – the hyper competitive and industrial nature of car design and production ensures the processes and equipment used have always been innovative, all the way back to the dawn of the discipline.
Nevertheless there’s a pervasive feeling that something has been lost in modern car design; an imagined past of artisans and craftsmen creating wheeled edifices of great artistic beauty, which has evaporated into history and somehow digital tools and unimaginative designers have facilitated this. There’s a romantic notion of someone like Issigonis with a pencil in one hand and a gin and tonic in the other, single handedly knocking out groundbreaking cars like the original Mini. Or the prolific Michelotti, solitary in his carrozzeria furiously sketching masterpieces for Triumph. Or more recently someone like Chris Bangle whose past work at BMW is undergoing something of a rehabilitation thanks to the polarizing nature of Munich’s current output.
Casting superstar designers as artists reinforces the narrative that car design is solely concerned with appearance. This focus on the superficial does not always take into account context, societal impact or engineering, marketing, branding or a million other commercial realities that designers must consider. There are plenty of good looking, well designed cars on the market at the moment if you are not too blinded by the past to see them.
Good Design Is Not Just For Expensive Products
We don’t go to galleries and museums all the time, but we see cars every day. So it’s understandable if misguided why some enthusiasts and auto-journalists are so enamored with the idea of describing pleasing cars from the past as art. But we live in an era where no one wants to be challenged, so this obsession with nostalgia just descends into a simple call and response without pausing to think, consider and evaluate. Discussions that primarily focus on past masters ends up concentrating on iconic cars and fetishizes their appearance without any consideration to whether they are good designs or not. It’s elevation without reservation.
The net result of this misclassification of certain cars as art is that it allows think pieces in automotive media to peel off the characteristics that are desirable to all enthusiasts and place them squarely in the hands of those perceived to be of status. A high end pursuit of an overly romanticized ideal – manual gearboxes, naturally aspirated engines, considered use of materials and thoughtful design invariably described using bullshit adjectives like curated and crafted, that becomes available only to a select few. I recently read an old article in this vein that talks about Koenigsegg designer Sasha Selipanov:
The lone exception was the Genesis Essentia concept, which may be beautiful, but its origin story means it’ll wait for history. The Essentia designer, Sasha Selipanov, is a protégé of Luc Donckerwolke and by extension Walter de Silva, who are two phenomenal contemporary design minds.
Sasha’s an Impressionist to the bone. He is a fascinating, short, bearded man from Eastern Europe who only wears Metallica shirts and counts among his favorites the Ferrari Dino and “Let’s get another drink.” The former Genesis designer swore to me over a few beers that he’d never draw an SUV.
(Emphasis mine on the above).
Get the fuck over yourself. You mean to tell me given the opportunity, you wouldn’t want to come up with the next Range Rover, Defender, Escalade, Wrangler, Suburban or G-Class? All iconic cars that any car designer would kill to be involved with? It’s the sort of pandering crap that comes from someone who has spent too long sniffing his own marker fumes, encouraged by a fawning press and an uncritical online fandom.
Ferrari has recently hinted that it may bring manual gearboxes back to its very limited edition Icona models. In an interview with the Australian car magazine Carsales chief product development officer Gianmaria Fulgenzi said:
“I don’t think all our customers want to have to train every morning just to drive our cars.”
Fulgenzi said Ferrari is now prepared to consider the reintroduction of the manual transmission – but only on cars deemed appropriate.
“In terms of mechanical gearchanges, it’s something that could be in the future, depending on product,” he said.
Manual gear shifting elitism is an essay for another time, but late last year I sat through a presentation by the chief product designer of Leica, which went into detail about the importance of design to Leica as a brand. He said it was crucial for the company to meet customer expectations in terms of usability, functionality, quality and feel across all their products, not just their cameras. Underneath it all is a consistent visual identity that makes a Leica what it is: a high end camera for customers who expect them to be pleasurably tactile to operate in a time honored way.
This commitment to branding, interfaces and consistency of operation is commendable, but what really wound me up was the inference – very much left not-unstated – that wealthy customers deserved this in their products and it was something only a company like Leica could offer. This is the thin end of the wedge in positioning thoughtful design as a quality that only applies to expensive products. A product that is nice to use is not for you, regular person. Superior design for me and not for thee. Let the piggies have their slop.
Creating bespoke cars… it’s what we do at CALLUM https://t.co/yAao8T7sao pic.twitter.com/XsUmBvX1Vj
— Ian Callum CBE (@IanCallum) April 4, 2025
Exclusive Design Not Better Design
High end customers have always desired different goods and service to the rest of us. Those products have long been used to signify wealth, taste and to gain access to the more rarified parts of society. Sure in the past a coach built Talbot or Rolls Royce would have functioned marginally better than a clanking Model T Ford and reflected your place in the social hierarchy. But paying for better mechanicals and therefore fewer breakdowns is a thing of the past. In fact I would bet good money a lot of the cars built especially for the Sultan of Brunei if examined closely would prove quite ropey. Cars have long been safe, clean and reliable to operate but those with enough money have still been commissioning one offs with varying degrees of success. What they signify is exclusive design, not better design, and certainly not art. What you are getting is rarity and something specifically tailored to your desires. It shouldn’t represent better usability and functionality than can be achieved by the mass market.
Having clearly labelled haptic controls that can be operated by feel without taking your eyes off the road and a sensory driving experience shouldn’t be the preserve of the wealthy. I’m not advocating for the universal introduction of manual gearboxes because most consumers don’t care. But they do care about how their cars look, feel and operate. An enjoyable experience in these areas should be available to everyone at all price points because we know it leads to more alert and engaged drivers, hopefully leading to safer roads and happier enthusiasts. Good design is democratic, and as enthusiasts and auto-journalists we should be demanding better for everyone, not just those who sleep on a bed made of money. If you don’t agree, you can piss off to a gallery and stare at a Rothko.
[Editor’s Note: I think this is an interesting take from AC and I generally agree with a lot of what he’s saying, but I do think there are exceptions; cars can be art when their intention of their creation is something other than their actual practical use as a car. Think about all those crazy hot rods and show rods from the ’60s and ’70s, for example. They’re sculpture:
Other than that qualifier, I think Adrian’s points stand, at least about elitism. Though I’m a little less eager to draw hard lines between art and design. – JT]
- I’ve Been Putting My GMT400 Chevy K1500 Pickup To Work; I Think It Might Be The Greatest Truck Of All Time
- Here Are The Cars That Car Designers Drove To Impress Other Car Designers At A Fancy Car Design Event
- Ferrari Won’t Paint Your Car Pink, Might Blacklist You If You Try
- Why Upstart Luxury Automaker Genesis Says It’s Never Thinking About Competitors
“Let’s knock off the elitist bullshit” coming from this guy is pretty fucking rich.
Which part of what I wrote is elitist? Have you read anything else I’ve written? You’ll know I’m pretty fucking far from being elitist. I’m a working class guy from the shit end of town. I only play an elitist on TV for effect.
Anything can be art. Art is whatever I think is artistic. Not that I disagree with this thesis because there is definitely a difference between art and design. But, design can become art since it can provoke the same responses in a person that art can and that’s really all that matters. Art can really be defined as anything that was created that moves you.
I believe I covered this point. What’s important to understand is why it’s a problem, which is what I try to explain in the article.
Really liked this essay. It’s not necessarily how I’d frame what art is (although it’s been a while since I’ve gotten my Art History degree, so my ‘expert’ status is long expired), but I’m reading this mostly as an anti-SNOOT argument, as well as a plea to not be so reductive about the way we talk about design, so I’m a fan.
The art world probably needs this sort of article more than the car world–there are so many snooty takes about what art is good or bad, and so often those takes come bundled with some completely ahistorical theory on What Art Is or Why Art Exists. I think the big problem comes from how people conflate the social purposes of art in any given society with the value we obtain as art fans. The truth of the matter is that art *does* have a practical reason for existing beyond engaging our emotions and thoughts, and that practical reason usually has to do with playing a role in society that flatters the wealthy and powerful people of that era (this was true in the stone age, and is also true now). I’ve always thought of the creative component of art (AKA the actual ‘arty’ part) as being whatever the artist can get away with, given the confines of what is being considered ‘art’ in any given place and time.
But because of its social role, art inevitably becomes linked to an exclusive part of society and gains this reputation for being something fancy, or out-of-reach for regular people (which I think leads to the same sort of bad takes that exist in car design, for similar reasons). Ultimately, I think it’s the purpose of art fans who know better to push back on this, and also continually reframe old works in ways that non-snobs find meaningful. But this means we have to embrace doing something inauthentic (as Walter Benjamin reminds us, any engagement with art that doesn’t involve the specific rituals of the time is inauthentic), and extract and explore (and expand our interpretations of!) the creative components of existing works. Without actually lying about its historical context.
This is why I don’t personally buy into the notion of a huge line between design and art. If you like ancient art, most of what you’re into (votive statues, ceremonial pottery, etc.) were considered good design for the time and would never have fit into our fairly modern concepts of what art even is. I think there’s value in exploring the creative component of any object, even if it exists on the more designer-y side of things, and even if the creator doesn’t think of themselves as an artist. BUT it’s still important in those cases to not develop some weird, inflated opinion of how great the object is just because it can withstand scrutiny as an art object. At the end of the day, art appreciation is a celebration of some creative decisions that a human being made (or, as I said earlier, what they got away with), and an acknowledgment that their decisions moved you, and it doesn’t have to be anything fancier than that.
I tend to define art the same way Justice Stewart reacted when discussing the difficulty of defining pornography, “I know it when I see it.”
The art world is currently trying to tell the greater public that a banana taped to a wall and given a title is art. I’m sorry, and maybe I’m exactly the uneducated rube the art world looks down upon, but I find it to be utter nonsense.
Now I’m being told that a car as beautiful as Dino, E-Type, 300SL or Miura is not art, but merely good design. Fair enough, and maybe that is objectively true. But I feel that some objects that have a function beyond their aesthetic are so well designed, be they a watch, chair, computer or car can transcend into an area that can be called art.
My G-Shock GW-500 is pretty well designed watch. A Hamilton Ventura is as well but it’s beauty becomes art in my eyes. Much more so than (Untitled Red) by Mark Rothko. A La-Z-Boy may be good design, But a Herman Miller Eames chair is to me also art.
If the art is defined as something “purely to be viewed and understood. Its purpose is to stimulate, start discussions, to be decorative and subjective.” and good design is it’s own and distinct thing, I’ll live in the grey area between the two. A Countach stimulates me far more than (Untitled) Black on Grey.
More than 200 comments later, clearly I think a major merit of this article is making people think. I have to say I went to sleep yesterday wondering about the points presented in this article – I’m sure I’m not the only one, and for that I’m grateful to Adrian for such a thought-provoking piece.
However, I do think there are two major points in this article, and maybe dealing with them together kind of drowns a bit the relevance of each one individually? For me, the point which is more clean-cut and hard to argue with is that good design should be for everyone – luckily I think it often has, just take the original Mini as an example. But, being an amateur photographer myself, I despise the elitism around Leica cameras, no matter how effective in their purpose they may actually be (and I honestly have some doubts about that).
On the other hand, the whole kinda-semantical debate about art, design, beauty, style, and whatever other words you may want to add to the mix, is somewhat byzantine on its own. I understand it becomes relevant when we apply the elitist lens to this discussion – say, considering a Ferrari Dino a piece of art but not a Fiat 500 – but other than that I advocate that there is a gray zone among the disciplines of art and design, specially because there are design elements that serve no practical purpose apart from provoking emotional reactions on people. Think about a tail fin on a car from the fifties, what’s the difference between that and adding an sculpture (which is definitively a work of art) in your living room? Again, I don’t think this is the most important discussion raised on the article – but I do think it’s possible to accept a somewhat more encompassing definition of art without necessarily going the elitist, snobbish route …
What people seem to be getting hung up on, is that I was being snobbish about what art is. Which is surprising seeing as I included a picture of a popular, accessible although somewhat kitschy piece of art, on purpose.
The point of the article was not strictly to have a definitive description of what art is necessarily, but to illustrate how it differs from design, and why that is important in making sure good design applies to all cars, not just bespoke cars for the wealthy.
Adrian, I find it difficult to comment on your articles (unless they include a question) because I find it hard to disagree with anything you write but also because I’m not educated or well read enough to add much to it (Torch already added the obvious here) and just commenting ‘great article/writing’ feels so dull.
I can say that while I prefer manual transmissions I have understood that I mostly just miss having a clutch pedal when driving autos, and while my Polestar fits my aesthetic taste in daily drivers well it’s not really a great design from a userfriendly perspective.
It’s maybe worth mentioning that a lot of (and especially in my opinion 1990’s ) Hondas offer exactly what that Leica guy thinks us plebs shouldn’t afford to experience.
Also while hardly relevant (but movies were mentioned) Fury Road is art while any Marvel or Transformers film aren’t just because it’s primary function is not to be an ad for a toy, car or a comic book.
(Also being called ‘Red’ anything is something I also usually take as a compliment)
Keep up the good work ????
Hence my line about most consumers not caring. Thanks for your kind words.
I was initially fired up to be contrarian to this, but Adrian makes very good and clear points here. I am an industrial designer. I have spent my career in automotive, aerospace, and consulting, with dalliances in the custom/hot rod world as well. During my design school education, there was a very strong delineation between “product” and “automotive” that irked me. A car is a product. In fact, you can argue that it is multiple products: a conveyance, an object of desire, a physical space, a thing in which you very much interact with. It is, in my opinion, the most complex thing one can buy. You have a computer? That’s nice, your car has several. Your house/condo/apartment? Can it shelter you while also reliably transporting you hundreds of miles to somewhere else? Unless you own a yacht or a business jet, I reckon your car is more complicated than anything else in your possession.
One of the things we were really interested in at one of my former automotive employers was designing a car that was, for lack of a better term, class-less. Not without “class” but one of those vehicles that anyone from any economic strata could be seen driving. Obviously it is an inexpensive thing, but the design telegraphs a universal appeal that transcends typical class divisions. I’m not sure it can be done intentionally. Cars like the original Mini, the Fiat 500, and hell even the Beetle, are cars anyone can be seen driving and not be immediately pegged to a particular economic place. Rich people buy and drive them for comfortable anonymity, regular people drive them because they are useful and enjoyable.
The best product designs do this a lot. It’s not art, but it is pulling at both emotion and logic in ways that can be very challenging for the product designer.
Adrian, this came at a pretty great time for me. I’m a couple weeks away from talking to a couple of classes at my son’s high school about industrial design and what it is I do for a living. My main goal was to provide a bit of awareness to the profession, but you’ve given me a LOT to think about for what I want to say to these kids.
Hopefully without embarrassing myself…
Here in Europe at least, it looks like the new Renault 5 has nailed that classless appeal. Remains to be seen if the new Panda will do the same but signs are good it will.
I wish we could get those here. I really like both, but the Panda is especially compelling. I really am smitten by it’s interior.
It suddenly hit me the other day – this is REALLY fucking good.
“Manual gear shifting elitism is an essay for another time”
THANK YOU!!!!
> Art is spontaneous and born from emotion
I’m going to disagree a little bit here. Art can be very cerebral and planned (e.g. Frame By Frame by King Crimson) and born from any number of things, like math (e.g. twelve-tone serial music). My compositions have come from all over the place.
I do agree with the main point of the article, though, I.e. that design is primarily purposeful and art isn’t.
There was a time when design was called one of the “applied arts”, i.e. artistic skill and sensibility applied to creating something other than what is generally understood to be “art”.
Bloody hell! When I was there in the mid-’80s, we went as a class to the Dean in an attempt to get the head of the course sacked because he was useless. If they had tried that on with us, God knows how we would have reacted.
And it always drove me nuts that the order of subjects in those product design annuals was always something along the lines of:
Whatever the actual order, vehicles were guaranteed to be last. (Not to mention the almost total exclusion of toy design, in the sense of toys that children actually want to play with.)
Yet the irony is a lot of those other disciplines specifically hire automotive design grads because good auto design students have a better aesthetic sensibility.
Yes, and the list is in roughly reverse order of technical knowledge required. The main criterion seems to be how close each category is to the holy of holies: architecture.
Disagree. Art/Fine Art is all about an “artist” manipulating one or more materials to “create” a final form/product. The only differences between a sculpture and a vehicle are that one moves (and one doesn’t/rarely move), and one is (usually) unique/a “one off” while the other is mass-produced. Using your logic, serigraphic or lithographic art ain’t “art”. Using your logic, tombstones can’t be art. I disagree.
That’s a very simplistic point of view.
Wait. What if Bansky stencils a large poignant and relevant work on the side of a poorly maintained firetrap of small rent subsidized apartments; is it art? What are the odds that the tenants are evicted so the building can be dismantled and the work auctioned? Does it become art only after it becomes useless as a habitable structure?
The building is the canvas. It only gets dismantled because stupid people are willing to pay a ridiculous amount of money to own a Banksy.
I think some people are missing the humble angle AC was going for here. And I also get why he’s annoyed with the pretentiousness popping everywhere.
But while I disagree with his angle, I do so because I think a great product design is even more “art” than what is being called art sometimes. Will you consider Warhol a greater artist than say, a famous architect? The architect pulled off an artful gesture while dealing with building codes and budgets, while Warhol rolled around on a canvas while covered in paint. Not to mention other bodily fluids. So yeah, I think some artists today are less relevant than a half decent junior car designer.
To me, Virgil Exner contributed more to art and culture than Keff Joons.
Some people? It’s pearls before swine around here sometimes.
The “elitist bullshit” that needs to be knocked off is that art is somehow separate from design.
Calling a car designer an artist is a valid compliment when their design is artful.
Denying them that compliment just because they design a functional object is the elitist bullshit.
The “elitist bullshit” in the title is supremely ironic considering the elitist gatekeeping occuring within the article.
Where am I gatekeeping? The whole thrust of the article is that calling car designers artists and feting them places their creations in the hands of those of means and out of the hands of normal enthusiasts. You can’t get more democratic than that.
You’re gatekeeping what art *is*.
That’s the beauty of art – it is defined by the viewer.
I was defining was design is not, as opposed to saying exactly what art is.
I think this is the impossible trick the article is trying to pull: the quality of the work should be a factor and that’s just unsolvable.
A cheap folding chair from Walmart has not seen design in its life (that is one point where you stretched your premise, not all objects are actually designed, just merely engineered) while staying functional. Compare that to a Titian whose work was by definition functional (all those dudes were paid to DECORATE) and now you have functional objects while only one is art. But if you compare a fresco to a Hans Wegner chair, then we’re talking something else. And if you take that Wegner comparison to put it next to the taped banana, we now flipped the tables I think and design wins.
The ‘25 Outback stays outside this conversation and should not be allowed anywhere near the room.
I mean this is fair a comment, but I’m trusting readers to be able to make the distinction between a cheap Walmart chair, and a folding chair from say, IKEA.
On the one hand, I regularly tell customers (especially my sports car owners) that it’s a car, not a sculpture, and it needs to be driven. You can leave a Jeff Koons baloon animal to sit and it will be just fine, albeit still look kinda dumb. You can’t do that to a 911. But if I agree with you entirely, you’ll have nothing to sigh and roll your eyes at me over, and I feel like that would let you down.
This article made me think of Swarovski, who got a ginormous stick up their collective rear ends a few years ago because the common folk were gluing crystals to fingernails and t-shirts, so now you can’t officially buy (or even state that your product contains) new Swarovski crystals or beads unless you’re a brand ambassador. Of course, they have no problem when a celebrity wants to glue Swarovski crystals to their body, or some luxury manufacturer wants to encrust one of their cars. 😛 It wasn’t enough for them to have a superior product; it has to have an air of exclusivity now.
On the subject of art vs design, I have a grand total of two class periods under my belt, so I probably shouldn’t weigh in on this – but I get the feeling that a particularly well-designed item can be pleasing to look at as well. It may not be art by itself, but it serves a function of art. I use Fiestaware because it’s colorful and durable, but the manufacturer has produced a few decal designs that look so good that I couldn’t resist putting them on display. Or the KitchenAid stand mixer…I’m appalled that some people store theirs away in an appliance garage. That thing is meant to be displayed on the counter. You can even buy decorative bowls for it! (Also, it’s freakin’ heavy.)
Disagree.
TL;DR, cool pics though.
I feel like I was baited into clicking on this article. There should be a word for that. I’ll look at a 1965 Buick Riviera all day long. Black on Grey is paint sample.
Tell me you know nothing about art without saying you know nothing about art
Therefore, architecture cannot be art. Yes?
Correct. It can contain art (murals etc) but is not art itself.
Between Jason’s take on CDs and this column, it seems like someone took away all the happy pills.
I have always thought of design as a form of art, or at least it can be. But I didn’t go to art or design school. This all feels more like a philosophy debate, and like many, it’s not black and white.
Eh, Autopian is not immune to budget cuts.
Bad editorial takes are a feature around here, not a bug.
I wouldn’t know. Mine are all correct.
What other automotive site is going to give you this stuff?
The Autopian is the only one I subscribe to and support financially, anymore. Twenty years ago, when the magazines were healthy and monthly, I subscribed to Automobile, C/D, R/T, Autoweek and M/T. Probably in that order of my enjoyment of the content. Before here, during the period while I was receiving dead tree editions, I read the “old site,” and missed the notification that the people I liked to read most there then were moving.
I’m happy that I found them here. I still miss the writing of some from the print days, but some of them have died or retired.
I don’t always agree, but I do enjoy reading your articles. Often thought provoking.
I try to be open-minded reading the articles and I am not by nature an argumentative person.
I worked in print and television journalism for more than 20 years and I (usually) mull over things I read and see before I figure out where I personally stand on just about everything. And while I was doing that, my opinion didn’t matter. In the process, while doing that, I just tried my best not to be biased. Be fair about presenting all sides of an issue. Often times, there are more than two sides to an issue.
The US feels like a very binary country. Ds vs Rs. And I grew up in a home with very B/W parents. Travelling abroad for work quite a bit as a news photographer and (in the less interesting part of my career) as a software engineer, the world got a lot grayer.
And I appreciate the thoughtful and (usually) apolitical comments on this site. The only thing about here that really annoys me is that I haven’t been able to figure out what order the comments get displayed and what is the most logical order in which to read them. And maybe not a bad problem to have, but it’s like I read, sometimes reply and then there are always new comments to read.
I’m wired to think the comments I should see first are the oldest so I can get the context of subsequent responses, and it just seems chaotic.
One of the reasons I like being here is I can write something like this, because it’s from the heart and not a hot take for clicks. So thank you for your support. I’ve said it before – you might not always agree with me but I will always be honest with you.
Comments should appear oldest first, unless it’s a reply which is threaded.
I’m glad you have/feel the freedom. And your stuff never feels like clickbait. The art/design threshold has seemed a bit treacherous borderline for at least 20 years. And like I said, it’s one of those philosophical collisions/divides.
There’s elegant design and crap design. There’s brilliant art (which is in the eye of the beholder) and crappy art. Regardless, it was a fun read, and the reaction has been interesting to observe.
Re: how the website works. Yeah, no. The way they show up in my browser (currently, MS Edge, is newest first. Which annoys the F out of me. To perhaps reiterate, when you get late to an article and get to comment, you’re on the newest set of comments, rather than the original (probably smarter than mine) comments. And that just bugs the hell out of me.
Maybe it’s because I’m late to show up, but when I get to the comments, to use this post as an example, I’m on page 3 and not page 1 where the original/older ones are.
It’s probably a quirk about how The Autopian’s webware/platform works, but it’s annoying. I’d rather read my way through what people have already posted rather than either saying something stupid that people had already addressed or be repetitive.
I don’t know, but maybe a good example is BMW’s “Art Cars” the car is the canvas for the art, not the art itself.
Exactly.
Counterpoint: by offering their cars as the canvas, BMW was actually claiming that their cars were art.
This gets too postmodern for my taste… is the canvas inseparable from art? Does the art exist without the canvas? Do the turnsignals work on the Art Cars?
never seen this argument age well in any medium.
Oh geeze.
I got about 1000 words into a reply that was maybe 20% of what I wanted to say, but I really don’t have time to finish it now, maybe later. In the meantime.;
Yeah, a lot of people misuse the word art. Plenty of crap gets labeled art and a lot of art gets labeled crap. I have a lifetime of training and and experience to back that up.
Are you certain that you’re not critiquing late capitalism and stock holder owned corporations?
There are cars that are definitely Art.
Don Potts’ car
Chris Burden’s car.
Some race cars , the Gurney F1 Eagle for example.
Ed Roth’s kustoms
None of those are particularly useful as transportation or doing car stuff, so maybe they aren’t cars.
I think the criticism of most modern American cars can be illustrated by the difference between the first year of a car design compared to subsequent years. For example, the first year of the Oldsmobile Toronado is absolutely beautiful, but as General Motors incrementally “improved” it, it became awful. So whatever the problem that GM was trying to solve, art wasn’t on the list.
If cars were Art in the Modern art history sense of modernity, not in the sense of “new” , car models would change less and less from year to year as the design was perfected. Once a car had gotten to its platonic form the only changes would be functional, better safety, performance, improvements in metallurgy etc.
The only American car like that unfortunately is Tesla. There are lots of things to dislike about Tesla, but the design isn’t one of them. In fact the truck’s problem is that it is too much of an art project. If they were sold in Vosin quantities, and Musk weren’t a manifestation of pure Evil, the truck would be on lists of design along with the Zeroll ice cream scoop, as well as lists of things that are deceptively difficult to ruin by improper washing.
Anyway, health emergencies in the family to attend to, maybe I’ll finish that other comment and post it later.
And I would definitely drive Marc Newson’s Ford 021C
The folks at MOMA would tend to disagree:
https://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2012/04/06/five-for-friday-plus-one-momas-car-collection/
Then there are the folks at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta:
https://www.wired.com/2010/03/high-museum-of-art-allure-automobile/
Then there’s the NC Museum of Art:
https://ncartmuseum.org/exhibition/rolling-sculpture-art-deco-cars-from-the-1930s-and-40s/
I’m sure there are others – but if actual art museums see certain examples of automotive design as having qualities that surpass mere product design to be appreciated as pieces of art – Then it’s art.
(Not going down the path of ancient art, specifically religious paintings and sculpture, that were created as means of spreading pro-religious-authority propaganda – not as mere pretty objects.)
But that is absolutely a valid path to go down. Ecclesiastical art was looked at as a mechanism that performed a function… either instructive or to inspire fear or awe. These weren’t works that were created to be “pretty”, which is a very modern way of looking at them. They had a defined purpose and were required to hew to a specific formula or they wouldn’t “work”. Yes, they were created for an emotional impact, but it was an emotional impact that was what the institutions that commissioned them wanted people to feel.