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.