Cars can be super sexy and art sublimely beautiful, this then, is one red hot collaboration. Art Drive has been running for 35 years and BMW now has an extraordinary collection of customised cars, including Koons, Holzer, Hockney and Warhol, literally anyone art-pop has got their sticky paws on these voluptuous, highly charged machines and performed an automobile alchemy. It is the first time these cars will come to London and they are being hosted by the ICA off site at the Great Eastern Street Car Park, Shoreditch. 

Which one would you choose? As fine art, mine is Jenny Holzer's, so true Jenny, so true! Then the years of 1975-77 are rather special, though it has to be the body work of the cars and my nostalgia as much as the art, a really superb time in design. I've always wanted a boxy Beemer to boot about town in, jungle bass kicking in and general showing off. And in my fantasy garage – in my fantasy house with my kitchen island and infinity pool in the back yard – I'd own  Alexander Calder's (75), Frank Stella's (76) and Roy Litchenstien's (77). Call me greedy, but in my fantasy life I wouldn't have to choose. 

Don't miss it. Honk Honk!

BMW Art Cars is a partnership with BMW, London 2012 Cultural Olympiad and Mayor of London. 

Nick Waplington and Alec Kronacker open painting shows next week. Kronacker's Life at Sea opens at Southard Reid from next Wednesday evening and Waplington's The Artifice of Eternity is at Mark Hix's Tramshed from Thursday.  I like them both. Kronacker (more here) pushes some fantastical nostalgic buttons of a made up history in me and Nick's is grotesquely persuasive on the eyes. Really looking forward to looking and feeling the pleasure that vision brings. 

I don't care what anyone says, painting is still the best art. Full-the-fuck-stop.

(Though, having said that, Nick did tell me that one of the artists in the group show currently at Hix individually gold plated a pack of Monster Munch, which is just about the best idea in art I have heard since Deller's inflatable Stonehenge.)

Painting: Alec Kronaker, House of Actresses' Legs, 2012 

I haven't written in my blog for a very long time. This could be due to me not wanting to share; or not wanting to share my thoughts with you, the unseen, un-trusted public that is. You're a funny lot, you others, and sometimes when we're twitching in the margins we just want to hide in the shadows, keep our cards close to our chest and not let you in. 

So what is to be trusted? Our pets certainly, sometimes our loved ones, always our inanimate and animated objects, but the thing that unites me to you – you other – that I trust in you is your art which is always mine too if it then makes any sense to me. I trust in you art, I have faith in you to always make things better. 

I was in New York recently and I felt alone and the only thing that made me feel better was searching out the art of others and in looking I found a unity and a delight and an 'ecstasy in communication' (1) that hugged me in a way only my mother can. That art was the art of John Chamberlain found at the Guggenheim, namely his foam sculptures, a honeycomb tactility bound tight, constrained in its being, it held me with it. Laura Favaretto's exhibition at PS1 also did something to me, and in particular her confetti works where something joyful, even a little humorous is at play but with a deep sense of unease. This unease was set free in a room where the confetti is blown about by industrial fans, the only thing I wished for however – though it was fun to watch – was the desire to be in the room with it; to have the confetti closer to me, to allow it to tickle my naked skin along with the air that it was intimate with.  I also got a sneak preview of Nick Waplington’s paintings at his studio. These are voluptuous, abstracted figures wrestling with each other, intimate yet in conflict, sexual but also vulnerable, joyful but somehow insidious – they’re paintings I want to live with; he has a show coming up at Hix’s Tramshed, so well worth a visit. And in going forward I want to bounce around in Jeremy Deller’s inflatable Stonehenge, Sacrilege a ‘social surrealism’ (2) where history is made plastic and the everyday is animated to a delightful hyper-real all encompassing environment. You can view where to catch it this summer as part of the London 2012 festival here.

I guess our taste in art moves with our innermost feelings; there is an aesthetic taste that is the core of us, but its also always changing dependent on our environment and our changing relations with others.  And when art works for you it binds everything together, relates one thing to another, and connects you to the world. This is the ‘ecstasy of communication’ that I think Richard Prince talks of, at least it is for me.

I am still feeling a sense of solitude, a fragmentary unfamiliarity with frivolity, a disunity to the real and at times an alarm with the seriousness banality of life – this will no doubt pass, and my mood will shift again – but it was nice to share this with you. I feel closer to you now. I'm still considering a pet though.

------

Photo: courtesy Nick Waplington

1. Prince, Richard, Thoughts on Spiritual America, 12/09/11

 2. Deller, Jeremy, Dazed and Confused, 2012

Paul Delaroche (1797-1856), Ophelia

Cold porcelain kisses your flesh
Bound hindquarters keep me safe
Bleached stainless steel blades light up the whites of your eyes

*Postscript: after writing this I learnt that Amos Vogel passed away early this morning. May he be forever in peace. 

Music to be still to:

There's been a lot of talk recently about this 'New Aesthetic' we're in. James Bridle has a blog here, a kind of visual essay on what it is. Bruce Sterling writes 5000 words on it here and describes it as "The explosion from the digital to the physical". These recent conversations seem to have been bourne out of a conference at SXSW The New Aesthetic: Seeing Like Digital Devices (which for the life of me I don't know why they haven't got a video up for us ... but there we go)

So we're all familiar with this aesthetic by now, even though the term may be new to us. The computer glitches, hicups, where moving images erupt and tear up our screens. When we try to work with a 175dpi image when what we need is a 300dpi and that image corrupts the more we push it and becomes something new. An environment of imagery where pixels multiply and reality converts to the virtual and corrupts the physical understanding of what we think we once recognised as the image of any given thing. 

Thomas Ruff, Jpeg bi01, 2007

Whilst thinking of this idea of The New Aesthetic my mind moves to Thomas Ruff and his Jpeg images that I think I first started to notice around 2009 (see an interview here with him for the Guardian). They have a kind of hyper-modern nostalgia to them already, akin to what sepia was for the images of our childhood, those lovely washed out dreamy aesthetics that nudge our memories. This new aesthetic of blured 8-bit graphics and fuzzy edges does that for our screen based eyes. 

So Ruff's new show, Nudes, currently on at the Gagosian is well worth a look I think, on till the 20 April. To see Ruff in conversation about his work and view other photography experts discuss the nature and future of photography visit Artist-Talks here. 

I thought I'd put a little compilation of videos together that either are in direct reference to the exhibition or certainly nudge my memory and thoughts into these places. The show is well worth a visit, his social anthropology and cultural commentaries makes for interesting art. 

More on Deller's exhibition with interviews with him and clips from his work here at Artist-Talks 

Big Daddy vs Giant Haystacks, circa 1980

Football Hooligans, Chelsea vs Middlesborough, 1989

The Prodigy, Out of Space, 1990

E Zee Posse, Everything Starts with an E, 1989

Acid House 1989 Illegal Rave part 4 Sunrise

Joy Riding is sexy or at least the noise is.

The Battle of Orgreave, 1984-5, Miner's strike 

OOOoooo, lookie here. 

David Hockney, Hawthorne Blossom, Woldgate No. 4, 2009

My favourite room at David Hockney's exhibition at the Royal Academy  exhibition, The Hawthorne Room, and my favourite work from the whole show, Hawthorne Blossom, Woldgate No. 4. Kind of candy colours just touching insipid, it’s like they have slightly subverted themselves; they’re totally my type of colours. The projection of light across the scene makes me want to breathe it in, it pulls you in. A road stretching into the distance, the destination out of sight; such a seductive symboliser of what’s to come, of time and of reflection. In my humble opinion Hockney is having some of his best years. Never stop painting (or smoking) you brilliant, brilliant man.

See Hockney talking about his work here over at Artist-Talks

Jonathan Grossmalerman, Guy Richards Smit, This is Sexy, 2011

A superb painting. Found at Bad at Sports which is full of great podcasts. This podcast features an interview with the artist at his studio with the The Ladies Auxiliary.

More info on the artist and related media can be found over here at Artist-Talks.

So it turns out that Dara Birnbaum’s work, Arabesque (2011), was the perfect work to spend time with on Valentine’s day. A multi screen work with clips taken from YouTube of women and girls working the ivories, perfecting their rendition of Robert Shumann’s Arabesque Opus 18 (1883), alongside stills from the film Song of Love (1947). It works a classical, tragic and possibly banal effect by way of repetition, of women playing their fingers raw perfecting a practice. Romantic reality really.

The exhibition of the artist’s work is on over at the South London Gallery and closes on the 17 Feb, so hurry along now. More on the artist here