Food As Art: A Feast for the Eyes (original) (raw)

Food and Art: Changing Perspectives on Food as a Creative Medium

This chapter will focus on exploring food as a medium for art (rather than a subject) and will examine the role of chefs at the intersection of food and art, within the larger narrative of food as a creative medium. Beginning in the 1930s, it explores the role of food as a medium in certain avant-garde movements and proceeds to look at their influence on later work in the studio and the kitchen.

Food, Art, and Dissensus: How to Begin Ethics with Aesthetics

This investigation of a point of connection between aesthetics and ethics unfolds in the context of a larger project on food, philosophy, and a reinterpretation of the relationship between the two. More specifically, my goal is to take food as a starting point for rethinking some of the basic categories of philosophy, with the understanding that the rather humble position afforded to the proximal (i.e., lower) senses by the tradition—and here I am thinking primarily of taste, but also of touch and smell (both of which, incidentally, are a major component of taste and tasting as a means of encountering the world)—constitutes a site whereupon we might begin to think seriously about why food matters, and for this discussion, how the event of eating as an aesthetic experience—food as art—might lead us not only to rethink an ethics of food, but also to rethink the very foundations of ethics more broadly construed. The impetus for this project has three rather distinct origins. The first is a prompt I employed while teaching my " Food and Philosophy " course: Monty Python's skit " Art Gallery " (watch it), which features the actual ingestion of works of art. 1 The second is my involvement in the planning of a recent exhibit " A Feast for the Eyes " at the Suzanne H. Arnold Gallery on the campus of Lebanon Valley College, which featured artist's renderings of food from traditional still life paintings to Warhol and Dali. The third, which provides the theoretical backdrop for this essay, is the recent work of Jacques Rancière on aesthetics and politics. My reflection on the aesthetics of eating thus places these origins within the horizon of what might be described as a general proliferation and even democratization of gastronomic experiences since the early nineteenth century. Such phenomena include, but are not limited to, the industrialization and mechanization of methods of food production from the farm all the way to the table, the acceptance of gastronomic taste as a metaphor for judgments of subjective taste in the arts and beyond (Korsmeyer 103-115), the rise of restaurant culture as a pleasurable and accessible possibility for the middle and working classes (Sweeney), the globalization of food economies and tastes, and more recently, the explosion and ubiquity of fast food, the rise of the chef as a cultural figure and icon, and the dissemination of food culture and knowledge through television programming dedicated to food. Such democratization, however, cuts both ways, and through my investigation I hope to expose the degree to which a particular distribution of sensible

Program: Perspectives on Food Aesthetics

An increasing attention to and interest in food, cooking and eating are hallmarks of contemporary culture. Cooking shows keep proliferating in the media, social movements focused on healthy nutrition are mushrooming and becoming ever more influential, and the culinary blogosphere and food tourism are thriving. Food and eating prove also inspiring to many contemporary artists, who not only view them as relevant subjects but also - more importantly perhaps - use food products as materials for their art. Can we food and cooking, without hesitation, call art? This question will be answered by the participants of Perspectives on Food Aesthetics conference. The special guest of the conference is prof. Richard Shusterman, who will give a keynote speech titled Somaesthetics and the Fine Art of Eating.

The Aesthetics of Taste: Eating within the Realm of Art

BRILL, 2023

When does eating become art? The Aesthetics of Taste answers this question by exploring the position of taste in contemporary culture and the manner in which taste meanders its way into the realm of art. The argument identifies aesthetic values not only in artistic practices, where they are naturally expected, but also in the spaces of everydayness that seem far removed from the domain of fine arts. As such, it seeks to grasp what artists – who offer aesthetic as well as culinary experiences – actually try to communicate, while also pondering whether a cook can be an artist

An artistic inquiry into the use of food in a photograph and its implications on cultural meanings

When the artist-photographer engages food as a subject matter in a photograph, the perception of the image goes beyond its physicality, thus enabling viewers to associate it with various conceptual and cultural meanings. This practice-led thesis discusses the dual role of food as both a material and subject matter in photographs. The study aims to answer the main question of how the use of food in photographs implicates its cultural meaning. This central question also leads to several sub-research questions: what are the approaches that photographers have taken in order to use food as a material; and in which ways can food be used as an artistic material to convey a sense of culture? This thesis employs the two modes of inquiry developed by Graeme Sullivan (2010): the "Intellectual" and the "Imaginative" mode of inquiry. Through the intellectual mode of inquiry, I examined two key issues: the challenges in using photography as a form of representational art due to the limitations of the camera medium, and whether photographs of food can ever be considered as fine art. This background research eventually served as contextual materials for my photo experiments where I developed a series of experimental photos using food as an artistic material. "Old is Gold" is the final series of experimental images that records my photographic journey in experimenting with the materiality of expired bread, inviting viewers to contemplate the materiality of expired food in photographs and to identify possible associations to any cultural meanings while consuming them visually and literally.

Can Food Be Art

The Monist, 2018

According to the ‘Consumption Exclusion Thesis’ defended by Hegel, the fact that food is consumed means that it cannot be considered a proper art object: art is supposed to be timeless and lasting, two characteristics that food lacks by definition. According to the ‘Interest Exclusion Thesis’ defended by Kant, when judging a work of art we should not have any kind of interest towards it, because aesthetic appreciation is characterized by disinterested pleasure. In order to defend the idea that culinary objects can be art objects we will challenge both theses by proposing a definition of art able to explain how culinary objects do last in time even after their consumption, and how our approach to them can be disinterested even if we are physiologically attracted by the food. Art and food matter for different reasons. Typically, we associate art with beauty, emotions, and creativity, while food is considered our principal means of sustenance (it is our fuel, providing energy to make o...