Daniel Arsham Made Six Car Keys From Geological Materials in 2023

Pick up the Porsche key. It weighs wrong. The familiar profile is there, the blade housing, the remote fob shape, the brand logo you recognize from 50 feet away, but the surface is wrong. Selenite has grown through the grip where your thumb goes. Pyrite has colonized the corner of the casing. The object is the right shape but it is not the right material, and that mismatch is where Daniel Arsham works. In 2023, he made six of these. Six large-scale automotive key sculptures, each based on a different marque: Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Cadillac, Mustang, and Volkswagen. The series debuted at the exhibition Wandering at Galerie Ron Mandos in Amsterdam (May 13 to July 9, 2023). The same year, his eroded full-scale cars were showing at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles. Arsham has been thinking about cars for years. These keys are the smaller argument inside the bigger one. ## The Material Breakdown The process is not metaphorical. Arsham actually uses geological and mineral materials: selenite, quartz, pyrite, and volcanic ash. Selenite is a crystalline form of gypite sulfate; it cleaves cleanly and grows in translucent sheets. Quartz is the most common mineral on Earth and also one of the most visually recognizable. Pyrite's grid-like crystal structure catches light differently than either of them. Volcanic ash packs and binds in ways that suggest compression over time. The combination creates objects that appear to be mid-decay. Not destroyed, not preserved. Mid-process. The keys are recognizable as keys precisely because they have not fully eroded. If they were gone, there would be nothing to look at. The tension is in the moment before complete transformation, which is the argument the work is making: memory compressed into form. ## What Keys Actually Are Arsham's explanation is specific and correct: keys carry memory through use. The physical wear pattern on a car key is biographical. The groove from the key ring, the oil from thousands of hand-touches, the small nick from being dropped on a parking garage floor in 2019. A key is a record of its use history in a way that almost no other small object is. By translating vintage automotive key designs into geological materials, Arsham is doing the same thing he does with phones, sneakers, and cameras: taking an object that once performed a function and repositioning it as an artifact from a future archaeology. The key no longer opens anything. It has become evidence. Evidence of a culture that organized entire economies around private automotive ownership and the small metal objects that granted access to it. ## Galerie Ron Mandos and the Petersen Together Showing eroded car keys in Amsterdam at the same time full-scale eroded cars are at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles is not a coincidence. It is a calculated argument presented at two scales simultaneously. The Petersen works operate at the register of monument: a full-size eroded 911, present in a museum context, demands the same attention that any large sculpture demands. The keys at Ron Mandos operate at the register of relic. Handheld, displayable on a shelf, priced for the collector who cannot acquire a 12-foot installation. This is smart exhibition architecture. Arsham gave the major institutional audience the large work. He gave the gallery market the portable version of the same idea. Both are legitimate entries into the series. Neither is a lesser version of the other. ## What the Market Says About Eroded Objects in 2026 Arsham has been building his market for over fifteen years. His institutional placements include the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Museum of Arts and Design, and multiple Galerie Perrotin exhibitions in New York, Paris, Seoul, and Tokyo. The eroded object series has been the engine of that trajectory, but the automotive subgenre specifically has accelerated in the last three years as collectors who overlap with the car world (a significant and liquid demographic) have entered the market for his work. A Porsche key that weighs wrong and will never start anything is valued differently than a Porsche key that works. That difference is exactly the product Arsham is selling. The geological material adds permanence; pyrite outperforms leather and plastic on a geological timescale. In a hundred years, the key from the glove box will be dust. The selenite version will still have its shape. The archive is expanding. So is the price.