"Photography is not art." - Man Ray      On 14 May 2022, L'Violon d' Ingres ( Ingres Violin), a black & white photograph created by Man Ray ( Emmanuel Radnitzky b.1890-d.1976 ), set a new record for the most expensive photograph when it sold for $12,400,000 ( 12 million & 4 hundred thousand dollars ) at auction. Inspired by Neo Classical French painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, this 29.6 cm × 22.7 cm (11.625 in × 8.9375 in) photograph is now owned by the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. ​      The photo is captivating in it's surrealist simplicity, a nude photograph of KiKi De Montparnasse', ( Alice Ernestine Prin ) his model, lover and companion at the time. Kiki was a French cabaret performer, painter, and artists’ muse who acquired her nickname for being a fixture in the bohemian circles of the Montparnasse neighborhood in Paris. She modeled for numerous artists such as Amedeo Modigliani, Man Ray, and Alexander Calder.      In Ingres Violin, she is posed half naked wearing a turbin, seen from the back with violin sound holes positioned on her back, thus transforming her body into a musical instrument, This picture maintains a tension between objectification & appreciation of the female form.        Man Ray was a pioneering American fashion & portrait photographer who worked primarily in Paris and was one of the key figures in the Dada art movement but his work also straddles surrealism. Developed in reaction to World War I, the Dada movement consisted of artists who rejected the logic, reason, and aestheticism of modern capitalist society, instead expressing nonsense, irrationality, and anti-bourgeois protest in their works.       Man Ray was also a painter and one of his works is The Lovers 1933, created in the aftermath of his passionate and sometimes volatile relationship with the beautiful American photographer and model Lee Miller. In their Surrealist love affair, she was often his model, frequently nude, and her sculptural presence in front of the camera – honed as a fashion model, is one of the most tempestuous and creative relationships in the history of art.   The naked body has, since ancient times, fascinated artists of all backgrounds. Sculptors, painters and illustrators competed to celebrate the body and represent it in its original state, as evidenced by the works from ancient civilizations, notably Egyptians, Greeks and Romans. Prehistoric representations of the naked human body can even be seen on the painted walls of caves and prehistoric statuary art. But if masculine nudes prevailed in Antiquity, especially among the Greeks, the trend has now shifted and it is the female body that has become the ultimate muse for artists.     In 1850 France, photographer Jean-Louis-Marie-Eugène Durieu (1800 - 1874) collaborated with artist Eugène Delacroix on a series of nude photo studies depicting a human bodies male and female. These model photos were created to help the artist paint & draw without having the expense of a live model.  Delacroix then called these "palpable demonstrations of the free design of nature," & later drew from Durieu's photographs. Durieu was a founding member of the Société heliographique in 1851 and the Société Française de Photographie in 1854.       Although the first known printed nude photograph was a male ca. 1840 France, the female form quickly grew in popularity for this new printing medium. Ever the entrepreneurs, the French quickly capitalized on this by producing  postcards of females in various stages of dress, undress and often completely naked.      Printed on a postcard sized piece of cardstock featuring a photograph of a nude or semi-nude woman. Such erotic cards were produced in great volume, primarily in France, in the late 19th and early 20th century. The cards sometimes depicted lesbians.        Some of the most popular models of the day appeared on them as well as singers, actors, circus performers & burlesque strippers. Nude photography has long been assimilated to a sub-genre of eroticism, no doubt because it mainly depicts naked women, but is now collected as an art form & still used by many artists in their work to understand the human body depicted.

French Postcard ca. 1900

Hand colored photograph for a French postcard circa 1910

Nude with a Mask by E. J. Bellocq

Black & white nude by Edward Weston (b.1886- d.1958)

First Nude in Color 1951 by Norman Parkinson for Vogue.

     Norman Parkinson (b.1913-d.1990) was a noted British fashion and portrait photographer who shot  beautiful images for magazines. Starting out as a Royal Air Force photographer in World War 2 he later gravitated towards fashion photography.

     Parkinson shot First Nude in Color in 1951 for a Vogue magazine beauty book. The photo depicts a naked fashion model  from the side, posing face down on a chaise type lounge chair in a sort of beige antique white juxtaposition of minimalist colors. Her body is long & her hair is immaculately coifed in this mid century masterpiece.

     Diane Arbus (b.1923–d.1971), was an American photographer who shot poignant images of the various people she came across in her street photography. She photographed a wide range of subjects including strippers, whores, carnival performers, transvestites, nudists, people with dwarfism, children, mothers, couples, elderly people, and middle-class families. People on the fringes of society fascinated her and she oftentimes got to personally know her subject matter as she documented her artistic visions.  In 1963, she made a series of nude images at a nudist camp in New Jersey. One such is, Waitress, a gelatin silver print  (37.2 x 36.3 cm (14 5/8 x 14 5/16 in.) now owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Waitress, a black and white photograph by Diane Arbus

Jeana by Patrick Nagel

Patrick Nagel (b.1945–d.1984) was an American artist and illustrator who created a remarkable archive of images epitomizing 1980's chic. First for Playboy magazine then branching into fine art seriography, he created popular illustrations on board, paper, and canvas, most of which emphasize the female form in a distinctive style, descended from Art Deco and Pop art. His minimalist style defined an era with cool, seductive women that became the most iconic of any single generation.      Utilizing staged photography of nude or semi nude uninhibited female models he met through his work with Playboy, Nagel then painted them on canvas or made film positives of his photos for silk screening  (seriograph) as limited edition works of art. These alluring images soon became immortalized in popular culture at the time. ​ In 2020 one such image, Jeana 1983, a 40" x 25" acrylic on canvas, shattered the world record for Nagel when it sold at Heritage Auctions for $350,000. Le Corbusier, a black & white photo by James Sasso 2002.

1950's pinup photo by Keith

Marilyn Monroe by Phil Stern

Giselle by Patrick Demarchelier

Sharon Tate by Terry O'Neill

Model in Directors Chair by Helmet Newton

Listen to A Conversation with Ellen & James Sasso: Making Art
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What inspires art and other questions.
Does art choose the artist or the artist choose art?
Can Art Cars really make a positive difference in our modern lives and culture?

Cadillac Ranch on Route 66 in Amarillo, Texas where 10 vintage Cadillac cars are buried in the dirt of a field.

What is art? Is art important?
  We need art in our lives to enhance the subtle energies of humanity & hopefully bring us deep feelings of inspiration, empowerment, awe, joy & other emotions. Art is something that stimulates an individual's thoughts, emotions, beliefs, or ideas through the senses. Whether experiencing the art or performing it, a beneficial energy is created in the process .

As the artist Pablo Picasso once stated; "Art washes from the soul the dust of everyday life".

It's a best practice to experience forms of art that inspires us in many different way. Art can be a visionary form of objectification & create a healing stamp on the subconscious when experienced.

 One object today that is ubiquitous in our everyday life is the automobile/car or motorcar, which is used for transportation on roads. A relatively new creation of humanity as we know it, the year 1886 is regarded as the birth year of the car when German inventor Karl Benz patented his Benz Patent-Motorwagen. Of course there has been many many others produce manufacture cars since then & in very large quantities, spreading across the world even now through mass consumerism.

Cars are one of the leading causes of air pollution & climate change ... Passenger vehicles & commercial, are a major pollution contributor, producing significant amounts of nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, and other pollution. Vehicle pollutants harm our health and contain greenhouse gases that cause climate change. Burning gasoline and diesel fuel creates harmful byproducts like nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, benzene, and formaldehyde. In addition, vehicles emit carbon dioxide, the most common greenhouse gas.

At some point in time after automobile mass productions became the norm & humans bought many cars, is the marriage of art & car; the Art Car. Art cars are sometimes but not always driven and owned by their creators, who are sometimes referred to as "Cartists."
The Art Car is a very interesting new genre in art history that could also be considered a form of ultimate Street Art, although it existed before this term was ever coined.

One definition we came up with (with help from internet) is -  An art car is an automobile vehicle that has had its appearance modified as an act of personal artistic expression.  An Art Car is basically a mixed media sculpture on wheels ( unless the wheels have been removed ) , a hand painted (or air brushed) expression on a canvas of metal, steel, plastic & rubber, sometimes utilizing 3d objects. 
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Beyond the 2D applications of paints,  3 dimensional objects can be affixed or even the whole car itself can be stripped down, reshaped,  and morphed into what is sometimes called Mutant Vehicles (more on that later).

An Art Car can be mobile & driven on roads or even a stationary object acting as an installation.

One example of stationary cars acting as outdoor Art Car sculpture is Cadillac Ranch on the road just West of Amarillo, Texas.  In 1974, a row of ten vintage tail fin Cadillac cars (1949 Club Sedan to the 1963 Sedan de Ville ) were half buried nose down into a dirt field along the Route 66 highway there.  These Great Monuments, we are told, represent America's hopes and dreams, art and commerce, materialism and spiritualism, folly and fame. Cadillac Ranch has since become a ritual road side attraction site for those who travel along the mother road. The remnants of the still buried cars are now covered in ever changing layers of bright colored spray paints and this installation also exists as a participatory event.

 In 1955, 70 years after the first 1886 automobile creation in Germany, Los Angeles artist Kenneth Howard aka Von Dutch ( 1929-1992) hand painted flames on a 1955  Mercedes 300 SL  owned by Earl Bruce. Von Dutch was inspired by the hand painted fearsome images & flames on WW2 fighter planes and he was part of the nascent pin striping hot rods/vehicle culture of Southern California. This particular  Mercedes was actually the first of it's kind stateside so the car itself was seen by most sports car guys as an absolute shrine to German ingenuity and technology. Like art, opinions can vary & some people found this to be "desecrating a shrine" and the art car version was not well received at the time, although surely it attracted great interest as art.

1955 Mercedes 300 SL by Von Dutch

Alexander Calder version of 1975 BMW CSL

Carmaker BMW is a leader in many things automobile & this includes the culture of Art Cars, as they have been a trendsetter in it since at least 1975 when .American artist Alexander Calder (1898-1976) put his art style on two 1975 3.0 CSL racing cars,
The result wasn’t just a claim of the first Art Car, or that this car was raced at Le Mans in 1975, but the inauguration of BMW’s Art Cars as we know the series today.
Calder’s piece formed the foundations for BMW’s ‘Art Car’ collection and many other contemporary artists ( Andy Warhol, Sandro Chia, Ken Done, Roy Lichtenstein, David Hockney & others) have since given their hand to this oeuvre, as both official and unofficial versions.

In 1979  artist Frank Stella painted a BMW M1  Procar  as part of his "Polar Coordinates" art series. In 1987 Keith Haring painted a red BMW Z1 at an art gallery in Düsseldorf, Germany with his signature style and distinctive range of emblematic signs.

    In 1996 Dallas, Texas, artist Jimmy Sasso was tasked to paint a 1996 BMW 320i for a marketing promotion involving a popular radio station Using oil based mediums, the car took 3-4 days to complete this mixture of abstraction & hand drawn symbols.

1996 BMW 320i Art Car painted by Sasso in Dallas, Texas.

1965 Rolls Royce Phantom V Limousine owned by John Lennon

 John Lennon Rolls Royce John Lennon of the Beatles bought the 1965 Phantom V limousine before he even owned a driver’s license.  Originally black with black leather upholstery, Lennon grew bored of the all-black vehicle & he was inspired to commission a garish paint job in the Romany style. An artist named Steve Weaver completed the work in May 1967. The bill was £290, about $9,200 in today’s dollars.

     Here in 2021 Art Cars are emerging as a popular expressive art form and important as  a  beautification of our urban areas & roads in communities. Aside from the cultural enhancements  is the recycle aspect or idea of making beauty out of a utilitarian machine that is a major cause of Global Warming and is helping to destroy our planet we all live on.  Keeping these 10,20 & even beyond 30 year old cars alive and on the road is truly an art in itself. A labor of love, an art object.
    Through the power of art an up-cycle recycle process occurs to transform a lowly used air polluting car into a roving art statement to be enjoyed and appreciated by the many, without anyone going to a gallery or museum.  An old car can become elevated into an art object & generate happiness to others and help heal society through these creations as they rove around not as a mere car but as art too.
In present day cities, artists are helping to spread this inspiring tradition & elevate our consciousness through the arts & propagate good energies using cars as that expressive vehicle.

   A 1991 Chevrolet S10 Blazer 4 x 4    -- This artwork titled Dream Warrior by Los Angeles artist Jimmy Sasso, was  started in early 2020 to artfully help heal a society in fear & repression from events. This vehicle for art blends into the urban landscapes as well as organically into natural settings, yet the colors, art & visual story create a bridge for the viewer into the fantastical realm of art appreciations, sometimes without even realizing. Free form drawings & brushwork create "energetic movement mixed with bright color and juxtapositions to inspire one into happiness".  the artist uses it as a vehicle to  bring about art awareness as well as explore nature in the Mojave desert and Eastern Sierras of California .

1989 Mercedes Benz 560 SEL painted by ARTtogo.com in 2019 Los Angeles.

      Swirling lines into organic shapes and symbols, writings & trans cultural surrealism adorn a 1989 Mercedes Benz 560 SEL that was painted in 2019 & sometimes roams the streets of Los Angeles getting 8 mpg but drives really great, smoothly sailing down the 405 freeway or stuck in traffic to the beaches. This Art Car generates much fanfare from viewers and inspires all to witness the greatness of art in our communities.

-- All Mutant Vehicles are Art Cars but not all Art Cars are Mutant Vehicles. -

One unique genre of the Art Car, is the Mutant Vehicles of Burning Man.  Burning Man, comprised of Black Rock City, a temporary art city which emerges in the sometimes hostile environment of the Black Rock Desert, a remote landscape in Nevada.
    A yearly event taking place over 8 days in late August, at least since the year 1991 at this location, Burning Man features various modes of camping, lots of people offering fun among large sculptural forms, performance art, sculpture installations, as well as Art Cars called Mutant Vehicles which roam the areas night & day, lit up with light, flames or even lasers & carrying people around while sometimes blaring loud music.
     With a speed limit of 5 mph, these mutants come in all sizes and shapes as they adorn the beautiful surrealistic flat desert called the Playa, an ancient dry lake bed made of hard packed white sand that sometimes blows up into sudden dust storms with white out conditions.
As NPR once reported, "Once considered an underground gathering for bohemians and free spirits of all stripes, Burning Man has since evolved into a destination for social media influencers, celebrities and the Silicon Valley elite."
    A Leave No Trace extreme camping event, Burning Man is mainly a huge art thing encouraging creative self expression & general well being. A unique cultural experience of sharing amongst like minded humans who like to laugh and have fun in an absurd atmosphere of art. Everyone is an artist and encouraged to participate in whatever form they wish. Dancing is an art. Hospitality is an art. Sleeping is an art. Fashion is an art. Photography. Cooking too.
  An acrobat balances on an Art Car/Mutant Vehicle called Playa Taxi. This 2004 Suzuki Aerio was painted in Los Angeles & seen on the playa.

A 2004 Suzuki Aerio transformed into an Art Car at Burning Man by ARTtogo.com

Boeing 747 turned into the worlds largest art car at Burning Man Project 2017.

The 747 Project, a giant Boeing 747, the world’s most iconic airplane, this is a 1985 Varig cargo conversion that once carried passengers in Brazil. This plane in 2017 was transformed into the largest art car mutant vehicle  on earth.
   The goal is to transform the plane into a new kind of vehicle inside which dreams, inspired by the same spirit of flight that took the Wright brothers to the skies, can come alive. The jet invites people inside for a “journey through life towards one’s future” & also hosts all night dance parties with music.
Art Car? Now you know.

Thank you for reading and hope you have learned something about art that you did not know before. Please add comments if you like Art Cars & want to see more of them.

Duct taped banana art on clothing.

 Have you heard of the duct taped banana?
Have you seen it? 
Probably not in person unless you are artsy and were at this years Miami Art Basel 2019. This "art", a banana duct taped to the wall of a gallery, appeared as part of an installation dubbed “Comedian”,created by artist Maurizio Cattelan. Three buyers paid between $120,000 and $150,000 for 3 limited-edition pieces of this concept, which came with a single banana, a certificate of authenticity and instructions on how to replace the fruit.
Amazing & such great spiritual value.
Surely he isn't the first artist person to duct tape a banana to a wall or be the only human being who can do that but why are people even talking about it?  Maybe that even makes it great art in a way as it generates such dialogue.

High concept fine art or low brow stupidity?  Some news reports have even have labeled it an art world scam.

For the uninitiated reading, the duct taped banana is considered to be a piece of Conceptual art, a movement along with Pop Art, formed in mid century 1900's NYC.
Conceptual, as in the "idea" itself or concept being the important aspect of the artwork, less so than the actual art itself or renditions. 
Pop Art is inspired by both popular & commercial imagery, as well as the everyday mundane object but also focuses on production methods and the whole business of being an artist as an art producing factory.  Appropriation is another key word associated with Pop as well as manipulating the media to write about it, thus marketing the art.

Both these American bred art movements have roots in 1910-1920's DaDa movement which originated in Paris. DaDa is focused on absurdity, articulated sometimes in nonsensical ways and satirical to the point of whimsy. Using theater, poetry, painting, drawing and music as an answer to the human horrors of war during that time in Europe.
They also drew inspiration from banal everyday objects that would possibly not be considered art, unless they tell you it is, such as Duchamp's aptly titled: Fountain ( a way of saying urinal or toilet something to piss in)

 On April 9th, 1917, just over 100 years ago,  Marcel Duchamp achieved what was perhaps the most brilliant and absurd art event of the 20th century by submitting an upside down bathroom urinal titled, Fountain, as his art piece for an exhibition and signing it R. Mutt. 

From an editorial at the time:  
“Whether Mr Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view—created a new thought for that object.” 

And on and on it goes even to this new day in our lives of the duct taped banana.

Which brings us to our very own blessed duct taped banana artwork, titled, The Hummingbird, available  on t-shirts and comfy hoodies. 

This is just for you from Art-to-Go.
​These are made to order and we made it really beautiful for you to wear plus there is free standard shipping right now.

 When you wear the duct taped banana Hummingbird, be it at home or in the store, bar or cafe, there is an aesthetically invoked communication going on via the trans cultural significance of the art, sometimes silent but a connection and something is happening with the viewer based on them seeing it as well as you wearing it.  A visual linguistic without words which sometimes leads to discussion with others or not.
Art in whatever forms, can be a bridge to something higher in all of us and our art acts as a bridge for positive energy, deep thought, communication, laughter or anything to commence a new experience in life, even if only for a moment.  That is what we have come to call art.
Perhaps even talking about it helps too. 

On the method used...we bought some bananas at Trader Joes for .19 cents each, duct taped one to the wall and then took a photo of our beautiful one of a kind banana with it's unique distinct markings.  This is our photo of a banana  and we hope that you like it.
Hurry ! Limited Edition ! Our prices are always subject to change.