Why We Can't Have Beautiful Things: Academic Says Ferrari EV Needs to Be Ugly to 'Expand Our Imagination'
Beauty in art is subjective, but not radically so.
We can argue over the merits of abstract artists like Jackson Pollock or Jean-Michel Basquiat, but we can all agree that more people are apt to immediately recognize the beauty in the works of Da Vinci or Michelangelo. Postmodern novels like “Gravity’s Rainbow” and “Infinite Jest” have their merits, but one does not need to argue about the merits of “Pride and Prejudice” or “The Brothers Karamazov”: One simply reads them and knows.
Shakespeare’s sonnets are more euphonious than Charles Bukowski’s drunken ramblings. Ancient Greek architecture is more beautiful than modern brutalist buildings, something that should self-evident from the fact that the style is called “brutalism.”
This point — that there is some obvious objective beauty in art — is supposed to be a conservative one. The left, we are told, embraces radical subjectivity; who is to say what’s beautiful? By what standard, by what presupposition do you say that we put beauty to a standard? This is supposed to be the left line, and I’d argue it’s wrong. I’d say we conservatives and cultural leftists both agree on the first sentence of this piece, we just feel we should do different things about it.
Exhibit A, members of the jury: The Ferrari Luce, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Politecnico di Milano design professor Carlo Ratti.
The Luce, for those of you who don’t follow the automotive world, is Ferrari’s first electric vehicle. Granted, some cars are ugly for a reason — the original Hummer, say, or the VW Beetle. Not Ferraris. They’re meant to be rolling works of art, and not just on the outside. The perfect interior, stitched together by the finest leather artisans in the world. The symphony of that V-12 engine. That gated shifter, emblematic of the uncompromising performance of the cars that bore the name of Enzo Ferrari, God rest his beautiful soul.
For a company that embodies the beauty of automotive design and performance, then, the EV Luce is a huge step forward into what we’ve been promised is the future of motoring. It’s an Event, capital-E, in the car world. It’s one of those rare cars that makes news. It costs more than a half-a-million dollars.
It is also, quite objectively, ugly as sin.
Ferrari has just officially unveiled its first ever all-electric car, called the Ferrari Luce.
• Starting price: $640,000
• Interior co-designed with Apple’s former head of design, Jony Ive
• Range: 280 miles (expected EPA)
• Peak charging speed: 350kW
• 122 kWh battery
•… pic.twitter.com/QjgHeP1hJm— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) May 25, 2026
The Ferrari Luce, spotted on the streets of San Francisco.
Still in shock that Ferrari thought this was the answer to their first EV… pic.twitter.com/03uTv4fVBs
— Zero2Turbo (@Zero2Turbo) June 30, 2026
This is a car that my 2-year-old wouldn’t add to his Matchbox collection — which is not inconsiderable and also contains such gems as an AMC Eagle, a Chevrolet Vega, and the Tyrell P34. For those of you not familiar with Formula One, that’s this … thing:
🇬🇧 1976 #Tyrrell P34 pic.twitter.com/05ZscnkIA3
— Retromania 52K+ 🆑assics & M🅾️torsport Lovers (@Retromania4ever) June 19, 2026
OK, so maybe my son is a bit promiscuous with his die-cast car choices. But I’d hope if he had $640,000 to spend, he wouldn’t spend it on something that looks like a Nissan crossover with the useful storage part at the rear end chopped off. It’s not even functional; this is supposed to be a performance car with 1,035 horsepower, yet any dummy can see it’s abnormally high for a vehicle that’s meant to have a low center of gravity for performance’s sake.
Enter Mr. Ratti, who took to the pages of The New York Times opinion pages to defend the Luce. Not because he doesn’t think it’s ugly like the rest of us do, mind you. It’s because he thinks it should be ugly — and not only that, we should embrace more ugly.
And Ratti isn’t just some nobody in academia and design dragged out for a contrarian take, either — although that would track, academia being one of the epicenters of the attack on objective beauty in art. In 2013, Fast Company called Ratti one of the “50 Most Influential Designers in America,” and he was named the curator of the Venice Biennale in 2025, among many other honors. This is a tastemaker — one who says we should actively embrace the destruction of taste. In other words, this is effectively a bit character from an Ayn Rand novel come to life.
I’ll let Mr. Ratti — who, in case the name and the Politecnico di Milano resume entry didn’t tip you off, is in fact Italian — explain it to you. From his Saturday piece, “It’s Ugly. It Costs $640,000. Everyone Is Mad About It but Me”:
Innovation is never easy, especially in Italy, where design is close to divine. From Ferrari cars to Armani jackets, from Prada shoes to Cappellini sofas, the look of things occupies a central place in Italian life. Style is a cultural value and a serious economic engine. When this aesthetic is challenged, people take it personally — another field in which Italians excel. And with Ferrari, it’s not just Italians who are furious: Gearheads worldwide have raged against the new E.V. machine.
Their animosity is out of alignment with how innovation works. The Luce — “light” in Italian — is meant to carry Ferrari into the age of electrification. The Luce’s critics should be praising the company for its willingness to rethink what an E.V. is. The transition to E.V.s like the Luce unsettles us precisely because it disrupts the comforting visual language we live in; building the cars of the future demands that we expand our imagination.
Yes, progress means we must visually unsettle ourselves. The future “demands that we expand our imagination.” Ratti, by the way, is hardly alone in recent hot takes from this department. For instance, this is the path suggested by people who think that the modern iteration of poetry is rap music. Director Christopher Nolan suggested as much when he cast a rapper in his version of “The Odyssey” — set to be released this week — because he “wanted to nod towards the idea that this story has been handed down as oral poetry, which is analogous to rap.”
You can definitely see the parallels. From Book I of “The Odyssey”:
Tell me, o Muse, of that ingenious hero who traveled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy. Many cities did he visit, and many were the nations with whose manners and customs he was acquainted; moreover he suffered much by sea while trying to save his own life and bring his men safely home; but do what he might he could not save his men, for they perished through their own sheer folly in eating the cattle of the Sun-god Apollo; so the god prevented them from ever reaching home. Tell me, too, about all these things, oh daughter of Zeus, from whatsoever source you may know them.
So that’s Homer. Here’s Travis Scott, the rapper Nolan cast as a bard because oral poetry is apparently analogous to rap, on his song “Sicko Mode,” one of his bigger hits:
Yeah, this s*** way too formal, y’all know I don’t follow suit
Stacey Dash, most of these girls ain’t got a clue
All of these h**s I made off records I produced
I might take all my exes and put ’em all in a group
Hit my eses, I need the bootch
‘Bout to turn this function to Bonnaroo
“Bootch,” by the way, is slang for cocaine, and “eses” are Mexican gang members. Bonnaroo is a music festival. It still 1) doesn’t make any more sense and 2) is exponentially more vile and ugly.
Are you starting to see the point? If not, here’s a comparison of Diane Kruger as Helen of Troy — the woman whose beauty led to the Trojan War being launched in the first place, for those of you not up on your history — in 2004’s “Troy” vs. Lupita Nyong’o in Nolan’s 2026 “Odyssey”:
Lupita Nyong’o responds to criticism over being cast to play ‘Helen of Troy’ in ‘The Odyssey.’
“Our cast is representative of the world.”
The actress has said the cast, which also includes transgender actress Elliot Page, is “representative” of the world.
“I’m not spending my… pic.twitter.com/YxzGtAxrfL
— Oli London (@OliLondonTV) May 25, 2026
Helen of Troy in the upcoming Odyssey Movie by Christopher Nolan
“The face that launched a thousand ships” pic.twitter.com/yNUBw4NqYJ
— Basil the Great (@BasilTheGreat) June 17, 2026
Forget race, which is what most of the narrative regarding the casting has been focused on: She is deliberately filmed, at least from what we have seen of the movie so far, to look unattractive. But her beauty is supposed to be the focus of the Trojan War, just as “Sicko World” is supposed to be the modern “Odyssey.”
And the Ferrari Luce is supposed to be the modern 250 GTO, the modern 308 GTB:
🏁🇮🇹
Elegance in motion. The Ferrari 250 GTO isn’t just a classic—it’s an icon of motorsport history. Cruising through Monaco, it perfectly captures the spirit of luxury, performance, and timeless Italian craftsmanship.
3.0L V12 • 300 HP • Legendary Racing Heritage#Ferrari pic.twitter.com/NMSbkajLpM
— Adrian (@allladddin) June 29, 2026
Now live at BaT Auctions: 1985 Ferrari 308 GTB Quattrovalvole. https://t.co/nfo8ZVTqGt pic.twitter.com/fmomxSxvyp
— Bring a Trailer (@Bringatrailer) April 1, 2024
The Ferrari Luce, and those who defend it, are emblematic of why we can’t have nice things anymore. It’s not that beauty is subjective in art to the aesthetic leftist. It’s that it needs to be attacked. It is, for example, the awarding of the prestigious British Turner Prize for art in 2023 to an artist “whose sculptures are made of everyday detritus to reflect the political instability of our times,” as the U.K. Guardian described it.
It was actually quite a bit worse than that sounds, somehow:
As ever, it’s just pathetic goading/status signalling. #turnerprize pic.twitter.com/P1WsKrj5H4
— Gareth Roberts (@OldRoberts953) December 5, 2023
But, back to the Luce. Ratti admits it’s ugly. Expensive. Cheap-looking. An insult, not just to buyers but to a corporate and artistic legacy. And that, he says, is the point. Get with the program!
“We need more of that willingness to experiment with car design; electrification and autonomy will ultimately change everything about how a car is shaped,” he says. “Let Ferrari thrive despite its Luce moment, a nod to the messy, glorious struggle of human innovation.”
Absolutely. Give the Ferrari Luce the Turner Prize. Give it a role in “The Odyssey.” Heaven knows it belongs in there as much as a rapper does, and it looks just as good as a boat as it does as a car. Have it constantly blaring “Sicko Mode” at full blast while it drives autonomously and forces you to read the novels of David Foster Wallace on its touchscreens as it takes you to the cold, impersonal, artless brutalist home it has autonomously designed for you, because you need someone to make aesthetic decisions for you and to make them as objectively unattractive as possible. That’s how the “messy, glorious struggle of human innovation” works.
The Ferrari Luce is a symptom. A very, very expensive symptom, but just a symptom. Carlo Ratti and those like him, those who want to force you to think like them because they want cultural authority over your perceptions of beauty, are the disease. There is such a thing as objective beauty, and they’re part of a long leftist project to strangle it. If you want to know where the ugliness of the modern world springs from, turn your gaze upon them and fix it there. Then, fix it yourself by bucking their ghastly project and embracing objective beauty. It still exists under that thin layer of subjectivity, and it yearns to be rescued.
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