ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how some automobiles are accepted as mainstream examples of contemporary fine art. In the MoMA exhibition catalog, Arthur Drexler, the museum’s curator of architecture and the organizer of that exhibition, wrote: “Automobiles are hollow, rolling sculpture.” The phenomenon of motorized vehicles in a fine art museum has not been confined to automobiles either. “The Art of the Motorcycle,” shown at the Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York City in 1998, and repeated in Chicago, Illinois, Las Vegas, Nevada, and Bilbao, Spain, was an immense success. The exhibition’s comprehensive catalog examines every aspect of the automobile, while also focusing on the detail of eras, including the bespoke coachwork on luxury cars of the 1930s and 1940s, and “The Streamlined Decade” of aerodynamic experimentation that followed until the beginning of World War II. Architects have sometimes lovingly designed automobile dwellings, the garage; urban planners and highway specialists continue to cope with the ever-growing numbers of cars.
