The Kia Soul is a small car that looks a bit like a box, which makes it stand out. It's popular because it's roomy inside, easy to drive, and doesn't cost too much, making it a good choice for many people.
A Cast V8 engine is a type of engine with eight cylinders arranged in a V shape, made from strong materials. It's often used in powerful cars and can be modified for racing.
'Souped up' means that the car has been modified to make it faster or more powerful than it originally was. This can include changes to the engine or other parts.
The Chevrolet Camaro is a sporty car that has been around since the 1960s. The models from the 1980s are especially known for their unique look and fun driving experience.
A luxury sedan is a fancy type of car that is very comfortable and has a lot of nice features. They are usually bigger and more expensive than regular cars.
Reversing the trunk and hood means changing where the trunk and the front part of the car are located. This makes the car look different and special, but it can also change how it works.
When a car is 'stanced out', it means the car is lowered closer to the ground and the wheels are pushed out to the edges, making it look sportier and more aggressive.
Fender flares are parts that stick out from the sides of a car's wheels, allowing for bigger tires and giving the car a more aggressive look.
Car
Mercedes-Maybach
Mercedes-Maybach is a very fancy version of Mercedes cars that are designed to be extremely luxurious and comfortable, often used by celebrities and dignitaries.
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Hello, happy Wednesday.
Welcome to the pile up.
The pile up.
The pile up.
The pile up.
I'm your host, M.Doug Knightmere.
Unfortunately, Rose is not able to be with me this week.
One of her best friends, Mark, Mark After Dark, aka Dark Mark, passed away on Sunday.
And she is, of course, grieving that horrible loss.
I was lucky enough to meet Mark at the 49th Van Nationals burning van.
He just struck me as a very kind, genuine, funny, gentle soul.
Mark will be missed dearly.
Rose, I'm so sorry for your loss and my heart goes out to you.
Coming out of the clouds today, I am going to talk about Larry Warsh, who is a man behind
Cart Department.
And that is the Instagram page everybody has been going bonkers over.
He lives at the intersection of art, cars and pop culture.
I know that you've all seen some of the wild posts on there, the two tonne nail sculpture.
This guy dropped this huge nail, like the size of a house nail.
I mean, it was thin, so it wasn't exactly the size of a house, but it went and like
through a car.
I can't remember what kind of car it might have been a Cadillac, but I could just
be making that up to Andy Warhol art cars, to photographs of Japan's biggest Deketora
rally.
I mean, this page covers it all.
But did you know that Larry also has a prolific art car collection with 60 plus cars in
his collection and he doesn't have a driver's license or a car and he claims he's not
a car guy.
It's 60 cars, but none of them, they don't drive.
They sit in a warehouse in New Jersey, which is where his collection is housed.
Warsh is New York born and bred.
He is a delightful art collector, philanthropist, publisher, and he's just a cool chill dude
who's invested in bringing art to the masses.
He has this great crooked smile.
Like I watched a interview with him and he was just like soft spoken and unassuming
and just really out there to bring art to the masses.
He started collecting things as a child, like what kids collect, you know, baseball cards
and comics and the like action figures probably, I don't really know what kids collect, but
I'm guessing that.
And at 12, one of his art collecting uncles took him to Sotheby's and that's when
he really saw the potential.
That's when he really saw the potential of collecting.
And he always talks about having a compulsion to collect.
So he is just always looking for the next thing.
He's the kind of art collector that other art collectors pay attention to, to see what
he's buying.
Musicians are often calling him and seeking advice like what painting should I invest
in which artist is hot right now.
He's boots on the ground, what's next kind of dude.
In the 80s, he lived in Astor Place.
At the time it was gritty and full of urban decay.
It was also the epicenter of downtown New York art scene.
It was the home of Keith Herring and Basquiat.
Larry came to the art car game a little bit later.
It was in 2013 and he had a Keith Herring and a Kenny Sharp art car.
So those are the only two he had at this point.
He lent them to Piston Heads at our Basel.
That's in Miami.
And he said when he went to the show it changed his life and he thought what
a cool idea all these art cars seeing a car as a canvas.
The cars in his collection range from 60s to now.
I saw a Honda, a Land Rover, a Maybach, a BMW, Porsche, Fiat, Buick Special, a mid-2000s
Dodge Challenger, a Ferrari, a school bus, a Hummer, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
They take anywhere from four to five months to a year and one car is taking
over two years to finish.
One of my favorites is Barbara Kruger's school bus.
Barbara makes large scale graphic installations with black and white photographs with
declarative captions in white, on red, future, a bold, a bleak, or Helvetica, ultra condensed.
So she always uses those typefaces and this is important.
One of my favorite pieces is a woman in rollers, like a 1950s woman in rollers.
And there's three different views, like a side, front and a side.
And at the bottom it says never perfect enough.
She kind of has this tongue-in-cheek commentary on feminism and consumer culture.
That's what she targets the most.
For her school bus, the history behind it is that Supreme stole her logo.
And as a fuck you, she created the bus with t-shirts, hoodies, and skateboards, and
sold them downtown New York.
And donated all the money to charity that she made from the merchandise.
And then Larry got the bus.
There she is being funny.
So the school bus is just a regular yellow, long ass school bus.
And on the side with the door, there is a big black rectangle with a white frowning smiley
face on the inside of it, that's above the door.
And then in red, with white type over it, is a big stripe across the top of the roofline.
And it says know nothing, believe anything, forget everything.
And then in black and white stripes, like white, black, white with corresponding colors of type,
it says wartime, war crime, war game, gang war, civil war, holy war, class war, bidding
war, trade war, cold war, race war, limited war, anti-war, world war, war for peace.
There's a lot of wars here, cyber war, ratings war, price war, war for world without women.
That just gives you an idea of the flavor of this.
On the back it says keep your distance, where are you going?
And then on the front it says do no harm.
And then on the, that's in between the lights, on the front, up on the roofline.
And then on the hood it says jerk in huge, huge letters.
And that's red on, white on red.
So yeah, Barbara Krueger's school bus.
It's awesome.
I will put a link to it in the show notes.
She's hilarious and one of my favorite artists.
The next one I want to talk about is my favorite car girl slash pop artist, Sylvie Flurry.
She's a multimedia pop artist and she often uses the car as part of the performance.
Like in the early days she had this piece called Between My Legs.
And she has the camera, she's in her 67 Buick Skylark.
And she has the camera like over her shoulder so you can just see her chest and her legs
and the dash and the steering wheel.
She drives around town with the stereo blasting with different things between her legs like
her pack of cigarettes, soda pop, probably a coke, I don't know, a coke.
I can't remember the other things that she had between her legs.
It was anything that she was like messing around with in the car.
She again is another woman artist who is super funny.
Another really cool like performance art piece of hers that I've seen is a lowrider hopping
on expensive makeup like Chanel, Lancome, Dior, et cetera, et cetera.
And then I believe she maybe photographs the makeup or she films it and then photographs
I'm not sure about, I think she photographs it as well.
But I just love that idea of using the car as destruction of very expensive makeup.
She has a Cast V8 engine that I think has stacks on it.
I'm not sure.
But it is like a souped up kind of like racing engine, looking racing engine.
I think it might be a Ford.
And then she has some tires as well that are cast in I don't know what kind of metal
and then like gold chrome on the outside.
And I think the tires might have a fountain in them.
But I don't know.
I could be making that up.
It seems kind of weird.
I don't know.
The car that Larry has from her is from the her skin crimes series.
And it's called girls just want to have fun.
It's a crushed car covered in Gavanchi nail polish.
And this, yes, is actually for real nail polish.
She covered an entire car in nail polish.
And I just have so many questions about these pieces because it's just like, did
they just get buckets of nail polish?
Like, did she know someone from the factory?
Did she just, she must have known someone or like maybe they knew of her art or maybe
she just cold called them and found like somebody high up and just said, hey, I'm going to
do this piece.
I'm going to cover a car, an entire car in like whatever number 17 of the color
that she wanted.
But anyway, it's crushed like, you know, it would be crushed at a junkyard.
And then the entire thing.
So all of the interior, everything is just covered in this pink nail polish.
It's not just this one car that's covered in pink nail polish.
It's a whole series of cars.
I don't know exactly how many are in, but at least four and definitely, I mean, probably
more.
I've just feel like I've seen four at one time.
One of them is a 80s Camaro, which I think is really cool.
So yeah, love, love Sylvie Fleury, Humble Bragg, Sylvie Fleury follows car crash.
And of course, when I saw that I just about died.
She's so cool.
And I hope to have an interview with her someday.
We've kind of talked about it.
She's a little bit of interview shy.
And there's a huge time difference.
But I hope I can make it work and just, you know, have so many questions for her
mostly about the nail polish.
So hopefully I can bring that to y'all.
I can bring you some Sylvie Fleury.
Not only does he collect artists, he also does like pop culture icons.
And one of these is the Otis car.
And that is by Jay Z and Kanye West.
This is from the music video Otis, which I'll put a link to that in the show notes.
It's a $350,000 Maybach cut.
I hope I'm saying that right.
And they cut it up in the video.
It's a luxury sedan and the trunk in the hood have been reversed.
So the trunk is on the the trunk lid is on the front over the engine.
And then the back, the hood is on the back.
And it actually looks pretty sick, I will say, especially the the hood
on the back is pretty cool looking.
They cut off the doors and the roof is cut off and two of the doors
are on the back as wings, but it's two wings, like bird wings almost.
Yeah, totally like bird, bird wings.
This car is so wild. Oh my God, it's so wild.
It's just barely stanced out a little bit.
And then they have bare metal fender flares and a bare metal chin spoiler.
And supposedly Mercedes was not happy.
With this rendition of their Maybach.
I think it's brilliant.
Mercedes, I think, is probably a little bit stuffy.
When it comes to the cars, Warsh says, for the cars,
I want to build a global destination, not just a car museum,
but an independent art experience for future generations to see.
After all, cars are dinosaurs.
And cars are kind of becoming dinosaurs,
especially if all the hypothesizing about
cars just being fully autonomous and us just kind of like zipping around in them.
So nobody really owning a car and cars just kind of like zipping from one person
to the next, like, you know, one million Ubers at all times,
ready at your fingertips, except for the person driving is not a person.
It's a computer.
Something else I thought was cool was that in the LA auto show,
which is like a new car auto show, I've been to one of these in Portland.
They're not really I'm not really into them.
Well, I've only been to one that tells you as much as I'm into them.
It's like the company showcasing their newest or maybe some concept cars
or like whatever, I don't know.
I don't care that much.
But West Coast Customs has like a showcase in there in like a little corner
or I think it's a sort of a bigger corner and they borrowed
a bunch of Larry's cars for that show.
So a bunch of his art cars went to LA and West Coast Customs had them
in their showcase, which I thought that was pretty cool.
And that's all I have to say about Larry Warsh,
the man behind Car Art Department, Cart Department.
He calls it. It's called Cart Department.
It's hard for me not to say car art.
And that's that wraps it up for this episode of the pile up.
Thank you so much for listening.
Send Rose some love.
You done been piled up by.
You
You
You
About this episode
M.Doug Knightmere pays tribute to Rose's late friend, Mark, before diving into a fascinating conversation about Larry Warsh, the creative mind behind Cart Department. This Instagram sensation merges art, cars, and pop culture, showcasing unique pieces like a giant nail sculpture and a collection of over 60 art cars that he doesn't drive. Warsh's eclectic collection features works from renowned artists like Barbara Kruger and Sylvie Fleury, each with their own quirky narratives. The episode explores the intersection of automotive culture and contemporary art, highlighting how cars can serve as canvases for expression.
