Wolfe elevated customized cars to high-art status against corporate culture

Evidence

Wolfe wrote extensively, and mainly admiringly, about popular culture in this period. He introduces the title essay of this volume, which is about customized cars, by saying, ”you have to reach the conclusion that these customized cars are art objects, at least if you use the standards applied in a civilized society” (76). He compares customized cars to the work of Picasso and Miró; he says of one car, ”if Brancusi is any good, then this thing belongs on a pedestal, too” (83). The use of the word ”pedestal” is a characteristic Wolfean, and sixties, move: high art and popular culture are one. … The culture industry, or corporate culture, is not the problem for the customized car artist; rather, the problem is the advanced age of the industrialists and their alienation from the sixties youth culture Wolfe celebrates: ”the customizers don’t think of corporate bureaucracy quite the way your conventional artist does . — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 267

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Wolfe saw Vegas as corruption of modernism, not its repudiation — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 294