Word: autos
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...course, by the '60s the car had moved near the center of California art in more ways than one, because California life is hardly imaginable without autos and thruways (nor is American life in general, but California is less so). The very perception of landscape and townscape was locked into auto experience. Even conventional views of buildings in the street, like Ed Ruscha's gas stations, give the impression that they're glimpsed vividly and briefly from a passing vehicle. And an essentially traditional modernist like Richard Diebenkorn, during the figurative-landscape phase of his work...
...exhibition's auto-eroticism sector does, however, include one triumphal fetish - Larry Fuente's "Derby Racer, 1975." Like some pious Latino decorating a shrine, Fuente glorified a convertible jalopy with an undulating crust of shards, beads, mirror fragments and pearly gewgaws. It is still a convincing, near folk object - an automotive equivalent, perhaps, to Simon Rodia's towers in the Watts neighborhood of downtown Los Angeles...
...stuff of which cars were made also became the stuff of art. Only in '60s California would artists adopt the artificial seductions of auto finishes, the glittering sprayed enamels and fiercely inorganic colors of glaze that made Ken Price's little ceramic sculptures so immediate and memorable. They manage to look luscious and poisonous at the same time, and in terms of what curator Barron and her team have set out to show - the weird confluence of vectors in a flawed and contradictory ex-paradise - they are perhaps the most "Californian" objects in this whole enormous show...
Ford's answer to that contradiction goes something like this: As long as customers want them, we will keep making SUVs, because if we don't, someone else will. We'll just keep making them cleaner and safer, and thus force every other auto company to do the same...
...William Clay Ford Jr. Industrial Revolution No. 2 moves forward. If it succeeds, a man named Ford will have changed industry again. The worst that can happen is that the public will get better mileage and cleaner air from the auto industry. That's not such a bad legacy for a rich kid. "People always say, 'You have enough money; you could do what you want,'" muses Ford. "This is what I want...