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]
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Cars can absolutely be, and often are, art. What’s elitist bullshit is insisting art is elitist by definition; it’s not, it doesn’t have to be, and combating elitism in art is more important than ever. Making art cars, turning cars into art, incorporatning car culture into artistic expression: those are all ways to combat elitism in art by incorporating an equalising element – the car itself.
Which is why I deliberately included an image of “Wings of Love”, one of the most widely bought prints of all time. The point I was making, that a lot of people seem to be missing or I didn’t argue clearly enough, is that insisting certain types of cars are art is an issue because it takes them and their characteristics out if the purview of regular enthusiasts and motorists.
Ok, I get that. But honestly, I don’t think “cars are art” is an elitist take at all. I think we’ve been seeing more and more mundane things as art – not just cars, other primarily functional things too – because we have a better collective understanding of art itself, and that’s allowed us to realise that mundane things can sometimes elict emotional reactions similar to those that art can cause. I see that as a democratisation of the notion of art, not as elitism.