Scholars Mind

The Road in Art and Song

Consider the art and music selections below: what aspects of being on the road do they reflect? Do they over-idealize the experience of traveling by car—or critique it unfairly?

Ed Ruscha once published a book of twenty-six photographs of gas stations, deliberately identical and deliberately boring. That is the argument half these works are making about the road.

Key concepts

Elevating the Banal
Making ordinary, overlooked things the subject of serious art. A forecourt and a cheap motel room get the treatment usually reserved for cathedrals, and the claim underneath is that this is what travel actually looks like.

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Every work — at a glance

  • Get Your Kicks on Route 66 — Bobby Troup / Nat King Cole (song)

    A 1946 hit that is essentially a list of towns — Amarillo, Gallup, Flagstaff, Winona — turning a highway into an itinerary you could sing without ever leaving home.

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What to know

  1. 01
    Medium tracks message here. The songs are built to move and they sell freedom; the still, silent pictures — Western Motel and Standard Station — hold a loneliness a three-minute anthem has no room for. The format an artist chooses is already half the argument being made.

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Across subjects

The open-road image was a sales pitch first. For a century, car and petrol advertising has shown gleaming empty highways and a lone driver in spectacular

Theme connection

"Are We There Yet?"

These eight assume the road is a friend, and half of them refuse to believe it. Notice who gets to enjoy it: the songs are about a driver going somewhere by choice, and the paintings are about the rooms and forecourts you end up in when the driving stops.

Practice — a sample

ARTA song treating the highway as pure freedom is MOST like —

  • A A traffic report
  • B A postcard of the view
  • C An advertisement for a car
  • D A repair invoice
  • E A weather forecast

Sign in to answer and see why each option is right or wrong.

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