Even certain forms of customizing like swoops and swirls and flames and pinstripes don’t necessarily transform an automobile into something to be admired in the art community. Don’t even get us started on the artistic value of a stock car. All those ads? Blech…

But art—real art—can be accomplished with a car as the canvas when a real artist is involved in making it that way, and that’s what BMW’s Art Car project has been about for the past 35 years. Andy Warhol designed an Art Car in 1979, and now, in 2010, controversial artist Jeff Koons has been given the opportunity to do the same. Only now are we starting to get a sense of what this new work will look like.

Any BMW dealership Palo Alto has to offer could sell you an M3 GT2, but none could tell you exactly what Koons’s version of the vehicle look like. Any BMW dealership Woodside has to offer could probably point you in the direction of someone who knows art—at least in the direction of the nearest art museum—but they haven’t really had any idea either.

Until now.

This year’s Art Car—only the third this millennium—will be based off of several high-speed pictures of racecars smashed into a collage on the vehicle. The concept drawings we’ve seen so far have been simply intergalactic and gorgeous, but there’s no way of knowing how the final product will turn out without actually seeing it. But we can guess with confidence that it will be artistic as all get out, and that even respected artists across the world can look at this with the same fondness as Warhol’s car and admit that yes, sometimes cars can be art.