WITH the launch of the Ford Ka, the most beautiful car in decades, let us now acknowledge the true guardians of the visual traditions of European culture - commercial artists and let us remind ourselves how absolutely wrong the defenders of modern art are when they maintain that representational art had explored all the forms possible before it embarked on abstracts, cubes and bits of, string hanging out of the nostril of a pickled armadillo.
Commercial artists, and most particularly the designers of cars, have repeatedly proven that the human brain and the human artistic impulse are capable of infinite variety, infinite inventiveness, infinite capacity for discovering new forms of beauty. The great truth about the beauty which commercial artists endlessly reveal in the mundane, the functional, is that it does not just appeal to them, the elites, but it appeals to us all.
That is the great and enduring characteristic of the human being, which lifts us above the other primates - we have a sense of beauty. Our preference is to make things which not merely function, but which look good. This is a universal characteristic of homo sapiens, evident in the Ford Ka of today as in the neolithic flints of the archaeological dig. Unlike many - and certainly not all - modern artists, we want beauty, around us we know it when we see it, we approve of it, it reassures us, and most of all, we do not need to be educated into it. No explanatory notes are needed to accompany something like the Ka, as they are beside the exhibits in the Museum for Modern Art in Kilmainham and other such palaces of Trite Ephemera. The beholder beholds, and beholds beauty, and cannot even begin to describe why it appeals. That is why there is more beauty in a traffic jam or a kitchen drawer than in most museums for modern art.
Beauty within limits
The challenges of car design defy easy solution because a car's beauty must be found within extremely limited and century old parameters which demand a weather proof, powered box for four people placed on wheels with lights on, all four corners; certain departures from the rules permit the box to resemble a shoe for two people, and that shoe we call a convertible.
How many modern artists, faced with such limits, would have hurled down the dead rat or the used condom which (hey, had intended to transform into a meaningful statement and declared it impossible to create a work of art within such restrictions? Most, probably yet those restrictions have given us an astonishing range of beautiful artefacts this century which, like great works of art, tend to reflect the priorities and aesthetics of their age. But their beauty is accessible to other ages, much as a Russian ikon or the Book of Kells ravish the beholder today.
Beauty has always been one of the vital qualities in motor car design, especially within the European and American traditions of art. Early Japanese cars were built with so little regard for aesthetics that they are the automobilic equivalents of modern art, being objects of accretion rather than of coherent - and intellectually driven purpose. Elsewhere, car design from the outset was driven not merely by the need to make a car which was capable of travel under control at speed, but was also beautiful too. The first Opel car, for example - which belongs to the shoe, rather than the box, pedigree - of 1899 was a shining example of a desire for beauty. Like most enduringly beautiful cars, it is curvilinear; its front and rear mudguards are joined to produce a footstep, which is the functional purpose of the design, but it is achieved with such an unnecessary, indeed wholly gratuitous, elegance that one can be sure the desire to create a work of art was as much in the mind of the designer, Friedrich Lutzmann as was the intention to make an automobile.
Itzmann was not unique. The first four wheeler Benz of 1893 was a creation of almost extravagant gracefulness, though Carl Benz himself was primarily an engine and would have disdained the notion that he was creating an object of beauty.
Recognised symbol
His contemporary, Gottlieb Daimler - they never met, though they both lived in the Neckar valley and between them were the fathers of the modern motor car - was even more obsessed with technology than Benz, yet his early designs were clearly driven by an aesthetic principle of which he was probably unaware. Nonetheless, it was the Daimler company which produced the quintessence of car beauty in the three pointed star which remains the most recognisable motoring symbol in the world today. Benz copyrighted the star in 1909, the same year its Blitzen car achieved a world record of 127 mph; and what was and is striking about the Blitzen is its elegant brutishness and its muscular grace. Clearly, beauty was never far from the mind of Hans Nibel, the genius who designed the Blitzen and other world speed record holders for another 20 years.
The desire for beauty is such an intrinsic part of car culture that we take it for granted; we should not. We should celebrate it as an example of man's visual ingenuity; and I say man, because I am unaware of any women car designers. Does it matter? Not much - but if there are female aesthetics, and I suspect there are, they inform the design principles behind the Ka. What does matter is that in 1996, precisely 100 years after Henry Ford's motor car, the Ford Ka has proved that within the modest limits of a box on wheels, it is possible to produce a work of art which obeys the aesthetic principles understood by Leonardo or Rembrandt or Orpen.
Fundamental appeal
These rules are part of our brain; they appeal to something fundamental within us, and have done throughout all our creativity, whether it consisted of shaping tools in the Olduvai gorge or pioneering motor transport in that gorge from which the 20th century emerged, the Neckar valley.
At the end of that century, the Ka reminds us what we are creatures of aesthetics, and in doing so, it does something else too. It is a living and triumphant refutation of most of the heresies of modern art. For that small mercy alone, we should be grateful to the Ford motor company which has not, incidentally, paid me for this diary.
Yet.