The Aesthete

My locale is Soho, the worst place on earth to demonstrate the pleasure and convenience of the motor car. Everyone walks. No-one in their right mind would drive into Soho, although people do. And when you see them, you know they are shell-shocked out-of-towners, doomed to circulate forever in a fuming spit of futility because there is nowhere to park.

Still, it was Soho where I chose to meet a senior motor industry contact of mine. Our venue was The Quo Vadis Club which my daughter manages. We nodded and clinked our delicious glasses of Picpoul. And this prompted a comment from my motorindustry friend.

He had just acquired a new car. German, of course, with an extra-big engine and a specification to humble the most obscene dreams of the Emperor Sardanapalus. It drove beautifully, was very comfortable and safe. ‘Do you know what’s wrong with it?’ he asked. I took a sip and said I did not. He replied: ‘It’s perfect.’

A fundamental truth in aesthetics – perhaps even in life itself – is that perfection is boring. If everything were beautiful, nothing would be. Ugliness, conversely, is always interesting, never dull. I like it that the architect Rem Koolhaas goes into restaurants and challenges the staff by ordering the most ugly dish on the menu.

Meanwhile, the modern car has, on principles Darwin would have understood, reached a state of bland, enervating perfection. What a loss this is. There are, to be sure, certain differences between an Audi A4, a Mercedes C-class and a BMW 3-series, but no fundamental points of distinction. Each is so good that the finer points of discrimination are irrelevant.

Pity the poor road-tester, I often think. How on earth do you find something to say about these paragons of automotive design and production? It was all so much easier 40 years ago when merely to describe the cack-handed execution of, say, an Austin Maxi would have given you a hilariously readable article. My old chum, the Californian performance artiste Phil Garner (now transitioned into Pippa with a huge bust), used to travel with a Maxi workshop manual because he thought the exploded diagram of the cable-operated gear selection was the funniest thing he had ever seen.

But I miss the Maxi. I am with Soren Kierkegaard who thought ‘the best demonstration of the misery of existence is by the contemplation of its marvels’. So exactly how miserable would a marvellous electrified Audi A8 make you? Here is a rebuke to the entire dynamic of our civilisation: the Audi A8 is, given the existing constraints of the human mind and body, of transport systems with wheels, of the space-time continuum, about as perfect as a machine can be. And it produces symptoms of narcolepsy. Is anyone going to bed tonight dreaming of an A8? I don’t think so.

No, the sovereign rule of aesthetics is that a little error, some malpractice, some malfeasance, some carelessness, a measure of ineptitude, a dash of willful cussedness, are attractive. But the fascinating question then arises: exactly how much error do we want? What mistakes could you retro-fit into an A8 to make it more pleasing? Compare with architecture: a whole city fastidiously designed by Mies van der Rohe would be intolerable. But exactly how much Jeff Koons crapola would you need to build to make it palatable?

Of course, the French have an expression for my beau idéal in design. This is jolie laide ,awoman both pretty and ugly at the same time, and you can apply this to cars. You can apply this especially to the Citroën Ami, a perpetual favourite of mine since, fascinated by its horror, I first saw one as a child.

Here are incorporated a quite exceptional number of artistic errors. First, that completely mad reverse-rake rear glass, possibly inspired by the ’59 Mercury, but with just an annoying hint of the old SNCF Class 22200 locomotives. Then there is the Ami’s face. Imagine someone taking a wax cast of an enraged Mauritian tomb bat and then melting it a little under a light flame. Do this and you get the front elevation of an Ami. The lozenge-shaped lights were acclaimed as an innovation. Yet what a thrillingly interesting little car.

Mies van der Rohe once said: ‘I don’t want to be interesting, I want to be good.’ I rather think we enjoy things more the other way around. But ponder this: as if to prove that design is an inexact art and that our taste is treacherous, the Ami’s designer was Flaminio Bertoni. His previous effort? The perfect Citroën DS.

‘HOW MUCH ERROR DO WE WANT? WHAT MISTAKES COULD YOU RETRO-FIT INTO AN AUDI A8 TO MAKE IT MORE PLEASING?’