STEPHEN BAYLEY

The Aesthete

‘Elongated microtonal dissonances’, I read in a recent review of a modern musical composition. There were no such subtleties on offer as I reviewed a coruscating range of supercars and hypercars. These were recently assembled by an old friend of mine who has the great good fortune to own a racing circuit. Forget about microtonal, this was the bombastic last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth turned up to 11.

While others chattered about lightened crankshafts, I pondered different truths in a highfalutin’ way. These cars were, to my eye, elaborate semiotic constructs. If they had a dissonance with life, it was macro rather than microtonal. Our historic moment is one of emergency, in design as in everything else.

I was crafting footnotes in my head about Roland Barthes and Derrida’s metaphysics of presence when someone said ‘You have got to try the new McLaren.’ This released a diabolus in me, so soon I was at the sharp end of 800 or so horsepower, and the McLaren Elva provided new definitions of terror. In ‘Race’ mode, the acceleration suggests what it might be like to fall off a tall building. At first rather exciting, then utterly terrifying and with only a fatal conclusion in sight.

A mutant strain of fast car has recently evolved, like a successful predatory virus. These are certain McLarens, Paganis and the Zenvo, the latter funded by Russians and created by Danish engineers. Which sounds like Switzerland founding a navy and hiring the College of Cardinals as admirals. They will build five a year. I think they said at a million-and-a-half a pop.

But to discover that the Zenvo has an engine based on an American iron-block, as used in dragsters, made me think of how odd it was of Vincente Minnelli to cast Kirk Douglas, a chisel-jawed Jew from Amsterdam, NY, as Vincent van Gogh, a Protestant from Zundert in the Netherlands, in his 1956 movie about the artist. So here is some of that dissonance.

Fifteen hundred horsepower! Here is redundancy creeping into definitions of lunacy. Redundancy is a luxury of the very rich. This sort of excess is similar to architects adding ‘vanity height’ to buildings: useless space, the purpose of which is solely to claim altitude records. Just look at The Shard.

Still, power is an aphrodisiac, although having as much as a Zenvo is like Sheikh Nefzawi’s diet of onions that, in pursuit of romance, gave him an erection lasting 90 days. Great fun, but not really practical. Fifteen hundred horsepower cannot even be used on a racetrack. A bit like Tantric sex, where the conclusion is that there is no conclusion. A friend irreverently suggested a little Abarth might be more enjoyable.

Turning philosophical, he also helpfully advised that there is an important difference between scratching your bottom and tearing your arse to pieces. I’m inclined to think that observing the difference between these two activities, and respecting the demilitarised zone in between, is a defining characteristic of civilisation.

But hypercars exist in opposition to civilised norms. That, of course, is the point. It is futile to condemn them for a lack of functionality. You could not call hypercars charming, but an aggressive confrontation with good sense is their distinguishing characteristic. While one part of our culture rejects dementedly ostentatious display, another cultivates it. This is Zenvo and Pagani territory.

In design, form never actually followed function, it only followed fiction. But it’s nonetheless a nice idea. It’s in the context that the hypercars are so disappointing, aesthetically. Designers have failed entirely to find an interesting expression of the lunacy and excess, instead relying on derivative forms already well-established by the mondain mid-engined supercar. Someone said my McLaren looked like Scalextric and I could not disagree.

Yet extravagant displays of wealth are always fascinating. In (1905) Henry James wrote about the grand houses on Fifth Avenue. ‘Their candid look of having cost as much as they knew how. Unmistakably they all proclaimed it… They would have cost still more had the way but been shown them.’ The way has not been shown to Zenvo and Pagani.

One of the strange characteristics of the very rich is that they almost always look bored and sad. I think this is because their hypercars, never mind the practical problems, are such aesthetic atrocities: the expense of spirit in a waste of shame.

Driving back to London, I saw an £83,580 Porsche Taycan in that surreal colour they call ‘Frozenberry’, a hue that elegiacally captures the prospect and disappointment of pink Champagne in paint. That’s more like it, I thought to myself.

‘A MUTANT STRAIN OF FAST CAR HAS RECENTLY EVOLVED, LIKE A SUCCESSFUL PREDATORY VIRUS’

STEPHEN BAYLEY SB is the individual for whom the term ‘design guru’ could have been coined. He was the founding director of London’s Design Museum and his best-selling books include Sex, Drink and Fast Cars and Taste: the Secret Meaning of Things.