And guess what? Nobody was upset about it.
Pininfarina, the world famous Italian design house, hosted an outrageous party during Art Basel Miami Beach called “Art, Speed, & Design: The Lifestyle of Pininfarina.”
The event took place at Lou La Vie, an exotic car rental showroom.
The highlight of the evening was an over-the-top, raucous and completely uninhibited live splash painting of a brand new Maserati by the street artist Mr. Brainwash, who was rumored to be one of the biggest sellers of the whole Art Basel week.
He stunned the crowd as he threw neon colors across the car’s opalescent white paint job, leaving streaks on the floor and the wall behind it as hundreds of Art Basel attendees looked on.
How it all went down
Everyone waited patiently for the artist to arrive, admiring the beautiful white Maserati GranTurismo sitting in the middle of the room. Then he showed up, looked the car over, and started mixing paint.
Here is where it got messy. He began walking around with the paint can as if it were slipping from his fingertips. Wait for it…
BOOM. POW. WHAM.
He did the unspeakable, and the onlookers watched in absolute disbelief. Paint was everywhere: across the hood, down the doors, over the floor. Then he moved on to Lou La Vie’s walls, painting on them too, and at one point he threw a paint can at one of them. To finish, he painted his signature phrase, “Life is Beautiful.”
The final product was a one-off Maserati that nobody will ever mistake for a factory color option.
Who is Mr. Brainwash?
Mr. Brainwash is the working name of Thierry Guetta, a French-born artist based in Los Angeles. Most people first met him in Exit Through the Gift Shop, the 2010 documentary directed by Banksy that follows Guetta from obsessive street art videographer to artist in his own right. The film was nominated for an Academy Award, and to this day people argue about how much of it was real and how much was an elaborate prank on the art world.
Whatever you believe, the career that followed was real. His first solo show, “Life Is Beautiful,” opened in a former TV studio in Hollywood in the summer of 2008 and drew around 50,000 visitors over three months. In 2009 Madonna asked him to design the cover of her greatest hits album Celebration, and he produced 15 different versions for the various releases. He also staged big shows around Art Basel Miami Beach in 2010, 2011 and 2013, so painting a supercar in Miami during art week was very much on brand.
“Life is Beautiful,” the phrase he painted on the wall that night, is the closest thing he has to a signature. It turns up on canvases, prints, murals and merchandise, which is part of the point. His work is loud, pop-heavy and designed to be recognized instantly.
The car that took the hit
The victim was a Maserati GranTurismo, the four-seat grand tourer that Maserati introduced at the 2007 Geneva Motor Show and kept in production until December 2019. Its shape came out of Pininfarina’s studio, which is exactly why the design house wanted it at the center of the show. The early cars used a 4.2 liter V8 developed together with Ferrari, later joined by a 4.7 liter version, and a total of 28,805 GranTurismo coupes were built over the first generation’s life.
In other words, this was not a beater dressed up for a stunt. It was one of the best looking Italian coupes of its era, and someone decided the best thing to do with it was to throw paint at it. That is the art world.
Why a design house would do this
Pininfarina has been around since 1930, when Battista “Pinin” Farina founded it in Turin. It has shaped cars for Ferrari, Alfa Romeo, Lancia, Fiat, Peugeot, GM and Maserati, and it now designs everything from trains and yachts to private jets. In December 2015, India’s Mahindra Group bought a controlling stake of about 76 percent in the company.
For a brand like that, Art Basel Miami Beach is the perfect stage. The fair, which has run in Miami Beach every December since 2002, pulls in collectors, gallerists and a huge crowd of wealthy visitors, and much of the real business happens at parties rather than in the convention center. Letting a famous street artist loose on a car your studio designed is a very efficient way to get photographed, talked about and remembered by exactly those people.
Art cars are older than you think
Painting a car as art is not a new idea, which is part of why the stunt landed. Artists have turned cars into canvases for decades, and the results have ended up in museums as well as on race tracks. What made this one different was the style. Most art cars are planned, masked and finished with care. This one was painted by hand, by the can, in front of a crowd, with no second attempt.
That spontaneity is what made the night fun to watch, and it is also why the car is a one-off in the truest sense. You could not recreate it even if you tried.
The takeaway
For most of us, a paint splash on a new car is a disaster that ends with an insurance claim. For a street artist at Art Basel, it is the whole point, and the car arguably gained value the moment the first can hit the hood. Just do not try it on your own ride. If you are shopping for something with a nice paint job to begin with, our guide to buying a used car without getting caught will help you keep it that way.
