To Ms. Harris, there are great similarities between being a stripper and driving a Fruitmobile. "It's all performance," she said. "The Fruitmobile is a very luscious and sensuous art object."

The Fruitmobile, which Ms. Harris drives somewhat regularly around Houston, is one of nearly 200 "art cars" from across the country that have been brought here for the 10th annual Art Car Weekend, a three-day retina-saturating extravaganza that has become one of America's zaniest roadside attractions and a sort of Venice Biennale for car nuts.

If cars are portable living rooms, car artists are the ultimate decorators.

The event traditionally culminates in an art car parade through the city.

This year it included a symposium in which Todd Rowan, 25, a doctoral candidate from the University of Minnesota, analyzed the cars from a Jungian perspective. At the Art Car Ball, held atop a downtown parking garage on Thursday night, the cars on display were better dressed than the people, and the "art car movement" was in full swing.

One Volkswagen bug was spotted doing a headstand on the roof of another, creating the evening's most unforgettable couple. A third Volkswagen bug was disguised as a buffalo.

Max the Daredevil Finmobile was there -- a 1985 Dodge van crowned with 13-foot-tall fins. So was Jan Elftmann, a Minneapolis artist dressed like her car, a pickup truck plastered down to its windshield wipers with corks procured during her 13 years as a waitress in an Italian restaurant.

Driving one evening past daiquiri sippers and white-jacketed valet parkers in an affluent neighborhood, Shelley Buscher, 36, a nurse-midwife, reflected on why she chose to paint her beat-up Karmann Ghia convertible with dreamy, celestial glow-in-the-dark murals. "It's too oppressive to have to express yourself by paying $30,000 for a Lexus," she said, as her car sputtered. "An art car lets you be who you are, not what a Lexus designer thinks is cool."

To ride around in 36-year-old Tom Kennedy's Max the Daredevil Finmobile, listening to the ominous rustle of Max's mighty fins snagging slightly in the canopies of trees, is to suddenly understand celebrity, to possess charisma. When Max passes a pasture and shows off his set of longhorns, "even the cows look up," Kennedy said.

To be there in the passenger seat is to recognize the distinctive red blur of video cameras pointing only at you as they hang out of speeding cars. It is to understand the pioneers, who had to read river currents and predict weather. (Kennedy has learned to avoid railroad bridges and 50-mile-an-hour crosswinds and to pray hard that wind shear does not extend to finmobiles.)

The ranks of those embracing such auto-exoticism seem to be flourishing, particularly among plucky young rebels armed with pistachio nut shells and other throwaway materials for whom the car offers a mobile canvas.

Houston has become a glinting hub for art car activity, and the last year has also seen art car parades in Baltimore, Minneapolis and even that bastion of autodom, Indianapolis. Art cars have also been exhibited recently in folk art museums in Baltimore and Santa Fe, N.M.

The 1,100 or so creative souls who had flocked here this weekend in iridescent caravans were revved up, chatting about adhesives and the best way to batten down eel hair. Their numbers included not only artists with a capital A but also plumbers, mechanics and systems analysts for whom these cars provided a first experience in making art.

They form a motley crew (to say nothing of their vehicles), and they seem to draw inspiration from artists like Judy Chicago as well as from Graceland and the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile.

Many car artists are following in the artistic traditions of both the hippie van and barrio low-rider, as well as of European gypsy wagons and the painted buses of the Third World.

In a recently published manifesto in the book "Art Cars: Revolutionary Movement" (Ineri Foundation, 1997), James Harithas, the former director of the Houston Contemporary Arts Museum, writes of "the God-given American right to be yourself and flaunt it on the highways and byways of America."

Standing amid sequins and grease at the Art Car Ball, not far from a car encircled with silver hoops that looked like intergalactic spaghetti, Ruthann Godelleri, a professor of art and design at Macalester College in St. Paul, had her own theory about what was fueling the movement.

"Unlike galleries and museums," she said, "art cars are open 24 hours a day, and they're free."

It is perhaps no coincidence that Houston became the place that Ripper the Friendly Shark, a Nissan Sentra that owes its comely larger-than-life-size sharkhood to several hundred gallons of spray foam and silver paint, calls home. (Ripper's tail sashays from side to side as he moves, classifying him legally as only a parade vehicle.)

That cars should be an "art easel of choice" in Houston, said Stephen L. Klineberg, a professor of sociology at Rice University, stands to reason in a city that earned the nickname Metro Petro.

As acutely as anywhere in the country, he said, cars here symbolize the city's self-image as a place of "unlimited expansion and individual mobility."

For better and worse, often worse, he noted, "in Houston cars are where we live." This is a town of psychic legroom.

Art cars literally became a grass-roots movement in the 1980s when Gene Pool, a New York performance artist, sprayed his car with adhesives, spread seeds and started watering. The result was a dense, green thicket of blades he called "Grass Car."

Perhaps the most pivotal moment in art car history came when Larry Fuente, an artist weaned on California hot rods and custom cars, treated Houston to his "Mad Cad." It was a pink Cadillac with a difference: the jeweled and beaded tail fins had, among other fauna, a double-decker flock of flamingos.

His "Cowasaki," a three-wheel Kawasaki motorcycle straddled by a stuffed cow wearing tennis shoes, became an instant art car icon. The Art Car Parade, sponsored by the Orange Show Foundation, a Houston group dedicated to bridging the gap between trained and self-taught artists, was born a year later.

Fuente is widely considered a da Vinci of the art car movement. So is David Best, who came from Petaluma, Calif., five weeks ago and built his parade car here. It looks like a science fiction movie on wheels, except it is a thing of beauty, with its 40 Chevrolet truck fenders, 80 tail and head lights, 10 vacuum cleaners, 2 1950s Chevy hoods and an extravagant exhaust system made from 58 Mercury headlights and a nose cone from a rocket.

The surface is encrusted with thousands of objects, including broken dishes, beads, dominoes, McDonald's giveaways, "Star Wars" figurines, five pounds of mussel shells, 108 miniature orange yo-yos, a huge chunk of amethyst, 1,300 plastic Virgins of Guadalupe, 150 snail shells and ceramic Chinese soup spoons. ("I love soup," he said.) In this company, the stuffed Cape buffalo head on the prow was gravy.

"We decorate our apartments, we decorate our houses, we decorate our gardens and our bodies and then drive brand-X automobiles," he said.

In a sense, the new car renegades aren't so different from the ones in the 1920s who personalized their Tin Lizzies by painting "lizzie labels" on them, smart-alecky quotations with double-entendres, many of them sexual, intended to create a lot of talk.

Of his experience as an art car driver, Best said: "Ninety percent of the people love it and give you the thumbs up. Five percent try to run you off the road. I understand both of those. The five percent I don't understand are the ones who walk right by it. They're a mystery."

To Ed Roth, 65, the patriarch of hot rodding, who figured prominently in Tom Wolfe's book "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby," art cars are the new hot rods, born of scrap, talent and gumption and what he called "the American impulse to think free."

"To me, these cars are very personal, which is the epitome of hot rodding," Roth, known as Big Daddy, said by telephone from his home in Utah. "When you look at them, it's the same spirit. It says, 'I can make this me; be a big shot.' It lets you erase difficulties, whether it's alcoholism or financial problems. We get into the car and everybody's clapping."

And of course, not all the rebels are young. Seven years ago, Armor Keller, now 59, spent six months covering her car in gold leaf in suburban Birmingham, Ala., to prove, she said, that she "wasn't this prissy middle-aged woman."