The article in the url below reviews an art show at MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Specifically, the show is titled Automania and studies the car as a piece of art; it is up until January 2022:
"In 1974 Andy Warhol bought himself a two-tone Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow — brown roof, black doors — custom-ordered from London. It didn't matter that Warhol had no driver's license. For some a car is more than a vehicle, and in 'Automania,' the Museum of Modern Art's engine-revving summer show, the automobile appears as an art object all its own."
For the art critic writing the review, however, while he can appreciate the show's artistic elements, he takes issue with its timing given the current discussion around the car and, more specifically, its fuel source:
"Of course it's the cars that are the main attraction of 'Automania.' Although, in a week when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change confirmed that 'warming from anthropogenic emissions from the pre-industrial period to the present will persist for centuries to millennia,' a show devoted to the personal motorcar feels a bit like one devoted to lethal poisons."
The author's favorite car in the show (1 of only 9 cars actually on display) is the VW Beetle:
"If, however, you asked me which auto says the most about the culture of its time and ours, it's the VW Beetle, parked upstairs, where it's shown with a 1950s film reel from the assembly line. Properly called the Type 1 Sedan, the small, aerodynamic 'people's car,' designed by Ferdinand Porsche in 1938, responded to Adolf Hitler's challenge to German industry to develop an inexpensive ride for a family of four. It would become, after the war, the world's best-selling car, and a motor – quite literally – of West Germany's economic miracle."
But, this reflection causes the author to take MoMA to task for its long-standing relationship with VW:
"In a wall panel the curators mention the Beetle's 'inglorious origins,' though there is more recent VW unpleasantness this show and catalog do not discuss. Over the last decade, MoMA has enjoyed more than a million dollars in support each year from Volkswagen – a company that admitted to equipping 11 million cars with illegal software to cheat emissions testing, and then lying to investigators about the scheme."
Specifically:
"While one VW division was violating the Clean Air Act, another was putting its name on MoMA programming that would boost its civic credentials — notably 'Expo 1: New York,' at MoMA PS1, a Volkswagen-funded ecological showcase from 2013 that in retrospect looks like an egregious act of greenwashing. 'Volkswagen is das Auto, and MoMA is das Museum,' Martin Winterkorn, then its chief executive, said pithily in 2015. He is now facing criminal charges in the U.S. and Germany, though he has long contended that he was unaware of any wrongdoing."
The point, of course, resembles the criticism that has been levelled at the Sackler family (and the museums that have gratefully taken their donations) for their stewardship of Purdue Pharma (and the opioid crisis in the U.S.). The author digs deeper:
"Yet even after one of the largest corporate and environmental scandals in history, Volkswagen's American subsidiary remains MoMA's 'lead partner of education.' It supports PS1's public programming, which took place for nearly a decade in a Volkswagen-branded geodesic dome (finally retiring it in 2020). The museum has a traineeship program known as the VW Fellows, who appear in Volkswagen promotional materials and even get to visit the car plant in Wolfsburg. And Volkswagen of America underwrote the restoration of the Beetle in 'Automania,' which the museum initially acquired in 2002."
But, it is MoMA's attempt to justify its ongoing relationship with VW that pushes the author to refer to a term I had not seen before – artwashing:
"And really, this might all be so much inside-philanthropy, except that the organizers of 'Automania' explicitly discuss polluters' interest in art in the catalog and the museum's online magazine. In both, Kinchin writes about the corporate practice of 'artwashing, a by now well-established branding strategy practiced by the polluting fossil fuel industry.' The curator singles out Shell, which commissioned English artists to make posters of the bucolic English countryside; it also mentions Mobil, whose art philanthropy in the 1970s and 1980s was the subject of Hans Haacke's institutional critique, and recent demonstrations against BP's sponsorship of London museums."
It is the hypocrisy that grates the most:
"For MoMA to criticize Shell, Mobil and BP for 'artwashing,' and then to ignore the criminal polluters still supporting its own museum, takes a real brass neck."
Take care
David
David Chandler
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At MoMA, Love of Cars Cuts Two Ways
By Jason Farago
August 13, 2021
The New York Times
Late Edition – Final
C11
