Totaled BMW Becomes Tragic Hero for Art Exhibit

Ever since the beginning of the year, German manufacturer BMW announced that 2011 will be for it more a cultural year. Meaning that a host of various partnerships and sponsorships will tie BMW to art events across the world, in a more or less successful attempt to create a cultural legacy for the brand.

Among the first art involvements this year for BMW is the 2011 Venice Biennale, an event that will open the doors to a whole range of other similar endeavors. At the Biennale, BMW is supporting, among others, an exhibition by Hungarian artist Hajnal Nemeth.

The exhibition, as announced ever since a week or so ago, features a crashed BMW, that has been turned by the artist into a work of art, a fallen hero if you like. To get the car model into exhibition mood, Nemeth was given access to BMW's Leipzig plant, where she filmed and taped various images and sounds.

Now, we haven't been to Venice recently, and we aren't what one would call modern art lovers. That means that, hadn't it been for the photo here, courtesy of Tihanyi-Bakos Fotostudio and The New York Times, we would have had no idea whatsoever how a fallen BMW hero looks like.

But now we do. It looks like any other totaled BMW taken off the street and placed under the spotlight, surrounded by the strange sounds of an auto factory and the whining of those noises through an eight-channel sound system. In Nemeth's view (and BMW's too), this is art. We just can't see it, hidden behind the twisted metal of the trashed Bimmer.