Jeff Koons has been selected to create the 17th BMW Art Car in the thirty-fifth year of a program that commenced with Alexander Calder in 1975 and has included such artists as Frank Stella, Robert Rauschenberg, Jenny Holzer, and most recently Olafur Eliasson, whose 2007 Arctic-sunrise-igloo-styled BMW H2R World Speed Record Hydrogen Car (top) was remarkably elegant but embellished to a point at which the unique car subject's recognizability was eclipsed. The idea of an art car, particularly one made from a luxury car base, may seem tautological (or self-reflexive, depending on spin); it also auspiciously, if subtly, implies some future state in which the vehicle of our age, like parchment, will have its use value rendered obsolete to be used, instead, solely in an economy of function-less exchange value like the art world.  The car as art object has, in recent years, become a fairly persistent concern. Pictured here is a smattering of such, proceeding from the second image Gabriel Orozco's La DS (1993), a Citorën, with the middle third removed, currently on view at MoMA; Matthew Day Jackson's car from the 2009 show "The Immeasurable Distance" at MIT's List Visual Arts Center; Erwin Wurm's fat cars; Justin Lowe's 2006 Helter Swelter at the now-closed Oliver Kamm 5BE Gallery, one of the finest shows in NADA Alley; plus Barry McGee's piled-up vans and overturned trucks; Matthew Barney's vehicular pieces from Cremaster 2 (1999); and looking further back, Martin Kippenberger's Capri by Night (1982), among others.  Perhaps Koons' yacht Guilty (2008) for Dakis Joannou (bottom) gives some indication of his ideas for the car.

Given the Cremaster-esque set for "Bad Romance," it comes as no surprise to find Lady Gaga's initiation of contemporary art collaborations, including last night's Grammy performance furnished with a piano with outstretched arms designed by Terence Koh.  In an unusual twist of cultural forms, Koh's piano calls to mind Pharrell Williams' human-legged chairs, though this may be a case of convergent evolution more than anything else. The next issue of Museo will feature an interview with Koh, conducted by artist Michael Bilsborough.

Candida Höfer's 2007 photograph, Masonic Temple Philadelphia (above), was taken in the Corinthian Room of the Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons of Pennsylvania.  Born of the historicizing impulses that defined much late nineteenth-century architecture, the lodge includes Egyptian (middle), Norman, Gothic, and other such historically styled rooms, all encased in a building with a modified Romanesque façade, the latter of which possibly speaks to the perceived origins of the order. The discrete character of each, set in a sort of architectural conglomerate, suggests an affinity of these builders' buildings with those of the contemporary vernacular and the post-modernists who mined it.  The Pennsylvania lodge's freeform pastiche of styles, including polychromed Greco-Roman-based forms, a familiar trope of the recent past (below: Michael Graves, St. Coletta, Washington, DC, 2006), proposes reconsideration of familiar dialectics: the post-modern condition does not strictly post-date modernism.

Bureau V's architectural drawings are featured in the current issue of PIN-UP, No. 7. Bureau V's Peter Zuspan is Architecture Editor of Museo.