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.
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...
2021
The philosophy of food is an emerging and distinctive area of philosophical inquiry, and much of the work in this area has been informed by philosophical aesthetics. In recent years, philosophers have found it especially productive to explore connections between aesthetics and the sciences and philosophy of the mind. This special issue of Crítica, Revista Hispanoamericana de Filosofía aims to bring together these two developments to explore what can be learned about food by approaching it from philosophical perspectives that are richly informed by our best aesthetic theories and our best theories of the mind. In this introduction, we contextualize the recent development of the philosophy of food as an autonomous subdiscipline within philosophy and situate the essays in the special issue in relation to that subdiscipline.
The two faces of appetite: Relevance and the question of food as art
Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio , 2017
Can there be "languages of food" in Nelson Goodman's sense of "languages of art" ? Food appears like a borderline case because of its strong dependence on context and on the individuals involved. We seem to have difficulty either comparing food with language or seeing it as art. This is at odds with the fact that food has been recognized as an art form for decades by art institutions. The paper approaches this problem on a level often neglected in the discussion: pragmatics, the application of language in context. Cognitive scientists Deirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber have shown that the use of language is ultimately based not on rules, but on relevance. Relevance in turn depends on contexts and individuals. Such dependence, therefore, does not make food a borderline case. Rather, it is something that food and language have in common. But can we use a concept of relevance to analyze food? Following the phenomenology of Alfred Schutz, relevance has two sides, termed here "typicality" and "spontaneity". Both sides of relevance are found to shape our experience of food in striking ways. Food is a particularly clear example of a more general, relevance-driven context dependence of both language and the arts.
Can Food Be Art in Virtue of Its Savour Alone?
Crítica (México D. F. En línea), 2021
Food has savour: a collection of properties (including appearance, aroma, mouth-feel) connected with the pleasure (or displeasure) of eating. This paper argues that savour is aesthetically evaluable —it is not merely “agreeable”. Further, like paradigm examples of art, savour can be assessed by how it references, or “exemplifies”, cultural norms. This paper is part of a larger project in which I develop an account of the pleasure of art. It is a virtue of my approach that it permits a much greater diversity of artforms than traditional philosophical aesthetics is inclined to allow. This includes food.
Exploring Food Cultures through Art: Meeting People Where They Are at
Education, Language and Sociology Research, 2021
Engaging people in critical conversations about food practices is often challenging. In this paper, we explore how an exhibition was used as an educative site to explore food insecurity and food cultures and to promote food ethics and healthy eating. Surveys and interviews from the opening night of an exhibition were collected and Bourdieu’s habitus was used to theoretically inform analysis. The diversity of artworks displayed were found to provoke critical reflection about food cultures among participants. Findings revealed the exhibition was a non-intrusive space for meeting people ‘where they were at’ in understandings of food and food practice. Artworks were found to evoke reflections on food as a cultural phenomenon and as a deeply personal component of everyday worlds. The tensions in making food choices and food as agentic in participants lives were highlighted. Findings suggest that exhibitions may support critical engagement with food practice when audiences are given oppor...
2014
Looking at the art scene in Pakistan and its globalized contemporary art culture, I feel there is a need for some change of space and the way art interacts with its public. I believe that not all art is or should be restricted to a gallery/white cube space, hence the idea of the display of art in a public space making the spectators comfortable to interact/socialize. When I say socialize, I mean socializing through ‘food’ as the artistic medium as an instrument of participation. Most importantly, the reason for choosing this topic is to work with food as an artistic medium to bring people together thereby blurring gap between the artist and the spectator. In this case, I will be exploring the possibility of food as an artistic medium, where the audience is not only interacting but is encouraged to partake in the work, breaking the traditional boundaries of art institutions and engaging senses otherwise prohibited in or absent from museum and gallery contexts. Resultantly, the gulf between participatory and observant art will be bridged to form a more casual space for socializing that usually doesn’t take place in art galleries. My dissertation’s focus is primarily on ‘Food’, its practice as an artistic medium and how this medium can help form ‘participatory artworks’. The answers that I am trying to find in my dissertation are ‘how is this medium reducing the gap between the spectator and the artwork in Pakistani contemporary art world, and consequently how does it blur the distinction between the artist and the participant? And what does one understand from the term ‘Participatory art’ and that participation through food with the audience
Food, Art, and the Challenges of Documentation
Liminalities, 2020
The documentation of performance art or any time-based art poses very similar challenges to that of meal/food documentation: how do you capture the experience (in all its multi-sensory glory) and reflect on it/study it at a later time? This paper explores the subjectivity and the partiality of food-centered artwork documentation and preservation, focusing on artist cookbooks as tools of documentation and their relationship to the original performance. It mines the gaps between the two as a gateway to thinking about the documentation of performance in general. I argue that one of the valuable contributions of artwork that employs food as a medium is in developing tools for analyzing and reflecting on subjective, multi-sensory, time-based experiences.
Picasso, Mozart, Ottolenghi? Why food is aesthetic and chefs are artists.
Here I defend the historically contentious claim that food can be aesthetic. I sketch four objections: the argument that food can’t be aesthetic because tastes are ephemeral, because food cannot induce contemplation, because tastes are indescribable or unjustifiable and because food has other purposes. I show that these presumed requirements are either met by food, or are implausible because ordinary aesthetic experiences do not meet them. I then defend the uncommon claim that chefs can be artists. I do this by arguing chefs intend food for aesthetic appreciation, and this suggests they are artists. I identify their artworks as abstract dishes. I also argue that because meat-eating is immoral, vegetarian chefs are greater artists than chefs who use meat. If my claims are correct, then Sibley is wrong to consider tastes to be minor aesthetic concerns. We should view and value great chefs the same way as Picasso and Mozart.