There's this thing that is always mentioned whenever you read about design guidelines. That is that every rule can be broken, if you have a good reason to do so. I think that might be why modern art is a thing by the way.

In the case of Ling's Cars I think the intention was to be so bad that everyone that ever wants an example of what not to do when designing a website can just use it as a reference. For that it works very well.