Going Green: Elton John, Damien Hirst create controversial art car with charity benefit perks

Go Green Cars! Green celebrity Elton John and art car designer Damien Hirst designed an Audi A1 for charity. While the custom paint work does resemble Dr. Seuss bird droppings, the car sold for a high dollar value and proceeds from the new car project will be used to help AIDS victims.

Green Celebrity Examiner via @greencelebrity / Photo credit: Cartopia

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Going Green!

Elton John and Damian Hirst teamed up to create a controversial art car with charity benefit perks --

Damien Hirst's Audi A1 art car created especially for Elton John may have sold for $526,786.61 at an auction to raise funds for Elton's AIDS foundation, but that does not mean it is getting resounding applause from the automotive writers world.

Cartopia writer and classic car enthusiast Jim Cherry writes:

This is really simple: Art cars are dumb. And wrong. And they need to stop. Now.

How hard is it for people to understand that cars are already art? Automobiles are in fact, the single most "impactful" art form on our planet today. Car designers train more extensively than 99% of the "fine artists." Their art has to safely transport us down the road at 80 miles per hour, after all. Since automobiles are the highest form of industrial art, to "decorate" them with some misguided artist's bullying attempt to impose his art on top of someone else's work is a travesty and a rank disrespect for the artists who designed the car.

One has to wonder how a genius like Damien Hirst (an admitted crackhead whose greatest work was finding someone to sponsor a glass tank full of formaldehyde with a dead shark floating inside) would feel if some other artist "decorated" his work? That glass tank with the shark looks kinda dull, Damien, "Hey, let's paint some graffiti on the sides!" The idea of "art car" makes as much sense as "art art." Would it really make sense to have artists add their own flourishes to a Van Gogh painting or a Rodin sculpture? Yeah, cool. Then we would have "art art."

According to Cherry, "Hirst did quite a number on Elton John's car, as pictured above. Flinging multiple buckets of different colored paint at the slick little Audi A1 give it the appearance of having parked too long under a bird infested tree on a planet imagined by Doctor Seuss."

His car review proves that no matter how much fun a vehicle looks to be as an art project to do, or how much money it can raise out of feel good sentimental value, that each car embellished really is -- essentially hurt in value.

For an art car to hold or gain worth, it has to have been something very special in its day and will likely be bough and sold only by a limited few.

Take, for another example, George Harrison's Mini Cooper.

Auto Pop Media reports Edmunds auto magazine stated the following about a replica car painted and designed like his that was about to be auctioned off for chairty. They share:

A gift from Beatles manager Brian Epstein, Harrison's gaudily painted Mini starred in the Beatles' 1967 flick Magical Mystery Tour. The re-creation will be handed off at next week's Mini United event at Silverstone.

A glowing report about the creative work that turned the everyday vehicle into something fun and fanciful for the benefit of a non profit organization?

Hardly.

The quote echoes the same sentiment as Cherry expressed about the art car donation: if it ain't broke, don't paint it.

[Even if you do make it pink, style it to look like all that and a bowl of cherries, and hand all the green cash you make right back to charity.]

Unless, that is -- you value the power of miles of smiles art cars create to draw attention in and of themselves and to bring happiness with them everyplace. In that case, re-design and customize away.