Food is art, no matter how major or minor.
Deresiewicz, W. (2012, October). A Matter of Taste? The New York Times Sunday Review. Retrieved April 27, 2014 from http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/opinion/sunday/how-food-replaced-art-as-high-culture.html.
“A Matter of Taste?” is an opinion piece by Portland author and essayist William Deresiewicz about food as an art form. Deresiewicz claims that since about 1994, food has replaced the culture of high art, rather than contribute to it. He says, “Foodism has taken on the sociological characteristics of what used to be known… as culture.”
About the ways in which food culture has replaced art culture Deresiewicz says that “just as aestheticism, the religion of art, inherited the position of Christianity among the progressive classes around the turn of the 20th century, so has foodism taken over from aestheticism around the turn of the 21st.”
Deresiewicz’s opinion that food is not art is supported here: “but food…is not art. Both begin by addressing the senses, but that is where food stops. It is not narrative or representational, does not organize and express emotion… Meals can evoke emotions, but only very roughly and generally, and only within a very limited range – comfort, delight, perhaps nostalgia, but not anger…or sorrow… Food is highly developed as a system of sensations, extremely crude as a system of symbols. Proust on the madeleine is art; the madeleine itself is not art.”
Elizabeth Telfer, though she concluded that food is a minor art (but indeed art), actually shares similar tastes in arguments with Deresiewicz. For example, she says, “…food does not represent anything else, as most literature and much visual art does. We can see the representational arts… as telling us something about the world and ourselves, and we can see the world and ourselves in the light of ways in which they have been depicted in the representational arts. But we cannot do either of these things with food.” (Telfer, 25)
Telfer does make room for food as a form of expression, which Deresiewicz does not. She says, “The inability of food to express emotion does not mean that cooks cannot express themselves in their work. For one thing, ‘expressing oneself’ need not mean expressing emotion… A cook can cook as an act of love, as we have seen, or out of the joy of living. But whereas in music the emotion is somehow expressed in the product itself – the music can be sad or joyful, angry or despairing – in food the emotion is only the motive behind the product.” (Telfer, 26)
While I appreciate and understand the analogies made between music and food, I think they tend to get a little misguided. For instance, Telfer loses integrity in her argument when she says “even with Schubert, we can spoil the experience by telling ourselves, ‘this is art’, instead of letting the song speak for itself.” (Telfer, 26) As a musician, this claim is absolutely ridiculous. Awareness of chord progressions, harmonic function, melodic contour, modulation, rhythmic complexity and variation, expansion of themes or motives, text painting, etc. (the list goes on at length) are all aspects of knowing or “telling ourselves this is art.”
Knowing why something is happening and how it is happening does not cheapen my experience of listening to Schubert; this knowledge of artistic creation heightens my experience, and it is what makes the experience more meaningful. Yes, we can all have certain reactions to various art mediums, and to some extent, art will evoke an emotion or aesthetic reaction from everyone. But to suggest that the only way to experience art is to “let it speak for itself,” cheapens the high quality skill and effort that has been drenched into these works of art.
Deresiewicz’s argument is enticing, because he doesn’t devalue the importance or cultural significance of food at all. He says, “yes, food centers life in France and Italy, too, but not to the disadvantage of art, which still occupies the supreme place in both cultures. Here in America, we are in danger of confusing our palates with our souls.”
But to include food as an art form shouldn’t devalue other forms of art. In fact, maybe it could heighten it. Perhaps the reason cultures such as those in Italy or France thrive in the area of arts and food is because they are integrated. Perhaps these cultures do consider food an art form! This is certainly worth further exploration. But essentially there is a science to food creation that is artistic in nature. It is a delicate, intricate skill that must be mastered to do and to some extent requires a level of mastery to appreciate.
The main question that has appeared in both of the author’s works, which remains unresolved, is this: should all mediums of art evoke a full spectrum of emotion? To bring the analogy back to music, music can evoke the deepest joy and the deepest pain, and everything in between. Music, for the purposes of this argument, is a single medium of art. If food is to be considered a single medium of art, shall it evoke a full spectrum of emotion?