The newest installment of the BMW Art Car series, created by the maverick artist Maurizio Cattelan, made its debut at Les Rencontres d’Arles photography festival in Arles, France, which opened earlier this week (until 25 September). The car was created in collaboration with Cattelan's Toilet Paper magazine and his collaborator Pierpaolo Ferrari. Dubbed the "Spaghetti Car," the BMW i3 has been slathered with a full-body decal depicting a photograph of spaghetti in Toilet Paper's signature deadpan style. “I have been disappointed in my efforts to make a good spaghetti sauce since I started cooking 37 years ago," Cattelan says in a statement. Cattelan's car marks the first BMW Art Car—essentially a single BMW with a very expensive paint job—since 2010's edition by Jeff Koons (the first, in 1975, was done by Alexander Calder). But intriguingly, a project spokeswoman insists that "it must be officially clarified that what Maurizio Cattelan created is not an official BMW Art Car. The artist’s design will be destroyed according to Cattelan’s wishes sometime after Rencontres d’Arles".
Cattelan’s “retirement” from the art world continues, meanwhile, with a vast new show at the Monnaie de Paris this autumn (22 October-8 January 2017). Details about the works included are sketchy but many of them, which will be displayed throughout the venue’s 18th-century salons, “will leave their image imprinted for eternity on the retina”, the organisers say. The famous effigy of Cattelan climbing out of the floor (Untitled, 2001) will “be the beating heart of the exhibition, offering the beginnings of a response to the show's primary interrogation, which is equally as tongue-in-cheek as it is metaphysical : ‘Is there life before death?’.”
