Home » The Most Valuable Trailer In The World Might Be This One, Which Is Covered In Beads

The Most Valuable Trailer In The World Might Be This One, Which Is Covered In Beads

There are few events in life that’ll convince me to drag myself to Brooklyn in winter. It’s not that I don’t have fond memories of living in the borough, it’s just that I’m lazy and have retained my Texan distrust of cold places. You know what’ll do it? A sweet vintage trailer covered in a million glass beads.

Also, a giant cookie. If you go to the Brooklyn Museum, on the edge of Prospect Park, you can get a big chocolate chip cookie with some coarse sea salt sprinkled on top. That, alone, is almost worth crossing a bridge and contending with the BQE for. If my wife had suggested we spend an hour in the car, each way, for a cookie I’d have probably passed.

Then she reminded me that Liza Lou’s “Trailer” was now on display in the lobby. If you know one thing about me, it’s that I listen to a lot of Pavement. If you know two things about me, it’s that I love vintage trailers almost as much as Mercedes does.

What Is This Thing?

American artist Liza Lou enjoys covering objects in beads. As she mentions in the video above, all objects are made up of smaller cells or particles that we can’t usually see.

“Everything around us is bristling. How do you give a visual experience of that without a microscope?” Lou says. “How can we bring that to attention? I’ve always felt that there’s something about applying with careful attention this material. It’s a way of seeing more than you’re seeing.”

This particular piece started life as a Spartan Trailer, a post-war camper made by an aircraft company based in Oklahoma. Mercedes has, no shock, written about one of these before:

In 1946, you could buy a 25-foot Spartan Manor with a 25-foot body for around $3,670, or about $59,848 today. What you got was an aluminum trailer built with the same semi-monocoque construction as the Spartan Executive, featuring art deco styling from J.R. Schutes.

The one on display in Brooklyn is probably a 1949 Spartan Royal Mansion 33′ or similar, like this one sold by BringATrailer in 2022. It definitely still moves, as it was towed in by the curators, though it’s clearly been sitting for a while.

That’s because the piece, which debuted in 2000, was purchased by collectors Sherry and Joel Mallin, who lived in Upper Westchester County and collected art for their Buckhorn Sculpture Park in Pound Ridge, New York. Based on this article from Sotheby’s, they grew up together but drifted apart after college, only to be brought together later by their love of art:

From the moment that Joel and Sherry were reunited in the 1980s, art became their life. As their relationship blossomed, art was central to their conversation: a work by Christo which hung in Joel’s home triggered conversations about the different things that might be happening within it, proving that art really is whatever you want to make of it. Together, they joined an art class where they made long-lasting friends with whom they would tour the New York galleries every week for the next 21 years.

Those are great couple goals, right there. Sherry passed away two years ago and Joel, who is a trustee of the Brooklyn Museum, donated the trailer so that more people could enjoy the work.

What Does It Mean?

Art is whatever you want it to be, so feel free to go to the Brooklyn Museum and draw your own conclusions. My daughter absolutely loved the piece and begged us to go back to see it one more time before we left (after going upstairs to see Judy Chicago’s room-sized “The Dinner Party,” which is the centerpiece of the museum’s collection). Did my daughter consider the connections it might have to the attempted murder of Los Angeles District Attorney Buron Fitts in 1937?

Probably not. She just let the intricacies of the glass beadwork and the sheer size of it wash over her.

If you want to go a little deeper, the artist says the piece was influenced by film noir. She was thinking of a sexy, loner type who is good with guns and lives out in the woods. He may or not not share the trailer with a chippy.

“I’m obsessed with black-and-white movies, like if I’m depressed or whatever, I’m the first one with Häagen-Dazs up there with movies,” she explains.

That’s definitely the vibe I got inside, especially from the bottle of whisky, gun magazines, and weaponry. All beaded.

There’s a deeper symbology probably at work here, likely inspired by the great Orson Welles film Touch of Evil and a real-life murder attempt, as described by Artnet:

Keep looking around, and you see a typewriter perched on the table in the kitchenette. Next to it is a sheet of paper with the words “Keep your eyes on the road to liberty,” a reference to an unsolved 1937 attempt on the life of Los Angeles District Attorney Buron Fitts. Those words were mailed to Fitts just hours before he was shot at and slightly wounded, possibly connected to a strike at a Douglas Aircraft Factory, according to a March 8 New York Times item. Are we in the home of a would-be assassin?

A television appears to play just out of sight in the bedroom; we see flashing lights and hear dialogue from what sounds like a classic film noir, where hardened gangsters discuss a numbers-running operation. What’s more, a leg is stretched out on the floor, visible only up to the ankle. A dead body? A woman’s? It inevitably recalls the feet of the Wicked Witch of the East poking out from under Dorothy’s house in The Wizard of Oz. (Perhaps incidentally, the film dates from 1939, just two years after the attempt on Fitts’s life.)

Because you have to walk up a little ramp it’s hard to make out the leg at first, but you’ll eventually see it if you stare long enough.

I really loved this piece. I also went back twice, and every time I noticed something I didn’t see the first time. If there weren’t people behind us trying to get in I’d have lurked a little longer.

In the headline, I mention that this might be the most valuable trailer in the world, which is less a financial value judgment than a more general one. A lightly restored Spartan of this type goes for around $80-100k. I have no idea what buying an entire trailer that’s an art piece would cost, though I suspect it’s insured for quite a lot.

I mean that it’s valuable in that two years of incredible work went into this trailer and the result is something almost priceless. You probably could remake it if you had the time and money, though I’m not sure you could do it with all the cleverness and dark intrigue of this one.