THE VERSATILE MOTORCYCLE

After its up-and-down history, what has the motorcycle become? For those of us who care, what are our motivations? All this has become pretty complicated. Read the articles on “The Motorcycle” in the catalog of the Guggenheim’s icon-breaking 1998 show featuring the motorcycle as art; they read like the authors are Freud, Jung, and Reich. Better not to talk about such things. Or maybe not. Let’s tweet everything that comes into our heads and see who salutes it.

Just after 1900, when the new, noisy, and smelly IC engine was irresistible to the wealthy few, the motorcycle gave the lesswell- heeled a whiff of the happening scene.

Industry flapped ’em out.