I’ve just returned from a conference on food aesthetics where, no surprise, the food/art connection took center stage. Use the expression “food art” and what comes to mind? Well, not really food. Still life paintings can be beautiful to admire. They do little for hunger.
During the 1960s food was used in happenings, happenings far from the experience of the table. One included a scene of “women licking jam off a car.” Another called “meat joy” involved young writhing bodies interacting with dead chickens, fish and each other. More recently, Felix Gonzales-Torres produced a sculpture made of candy in brightly colored wrappers, a work commemorating the death of Gonzales-Torres’ partner.
What do these have in common? Ordinary eating is bracketed. When Chefs are hailed as artists they tend to be those who have “elevated” cookery from the realm of the everyday. Ferran Adria’s molecular cooking and Heston Blumenthal’s playful creations have allowed them to drift upward.
Seems sensible enough. “Sensible enough” though, is precisely what sets philosophers going. It means that among a possible range of options, one has become so central that others are forgotten. Thinking, envisioning other possibilities, is then blocked.
“Art” offers a paradigmatic case. I often ask students to identify favorite artists. The responses: Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Goya, Pollock, Monet. I then indicate how the question was not about favorite painters, but artists. The sedimented sense of “Art” is well symbolized by the unquestioned and thus unreflected upon assumption that painting is what should primarily come to mind when we discuss “Art.”
Such an understanding of Art (upper case “A” is important) emerges within a specific philosophical take on things. This particular take characterizes humans as essentially spectators to the world. Those arts which are most “spectatorial” then move to central prominence.
The inherited philosophy devalorizes the everyday world of ordinary practices. Beauty is outsourced. To the museum, the concert hall, the theatre. This is what allows the complementary conceptualizations “fine” and “applied” to emerge. As a corollary, fine and applied are inversely related. Works “tainted” with utility, arts like weaving, pottery, architecture, ritualistic dancing, landscape design and cookery, fall to a secondary status.
Changing the complementary labels I would say that, in the inherited framework, the only way that the operative arts can rise in stature, is to approximate the spectatorial ones. Heston Blumenthal’s Artist credentials are evident when he re-envisions sugary, frozen treats of his youth, transforming them into savory concoctions which stun, surprise and wow his patrons. Similarly, when a diner bites down on one of Ferran Adria’s liquid “olives” there is surprise, wonderment, astonishment. Above all, the experience must move well beyond a regular, normal repast.
But that is to violate one of the great injunctions of creativity: working within constraints while making excellence real. A vase that is exceptionally lovely but not functional falls short in this regard. When we think of operative creativity as that which offers the best combinations, combinations which include utility, then judgments about what counts as fineness become more suitably contextualized. There is no longer need to copy the spectator arts in order to achieve fineness. For the operative arts, living beauty in day-to-day existence becomes a major desideratum. It also offers special challenges to creativity, challenges that cannot be bracketed.
If this is the case, the contemporary way of selecting food artists highlights the wrong exemplars. We tend to fasten on those who can most imitate and emulate the spectatorial arts, the Adrias and Blumenthals. If we emphasize day-to-day beauty, stressing the conjunction of beauty and use, insisting that fuller, more replete beauty lives in this combination, a combination requiring high levels of creativity, other models come to mind. I am thinking in particular of Julia Child and Alice Waters. What both of these chefs aimed at was food that looks like food, tastes like food, satisfies hunger, encourages conviviality, is complex, and delicious. Waters specifically named her restaurant after a hospitable, generous fictional character. She hoped a meal at her restaurant would be like a convivial dinner at home. 
What is important here is how the particular experience, which is participational, tied to nutrition, and associated with sociality, is brought to its highest culmination, a culmination that does not force cookery to mimic the spectator arts. The operative arts can achieve levels of fineness at the highest level. They serve as models for the rest of us. They also set a standard for living beauty rather than outsourcing it. In these regards it seems to me better to celebrate Julia and Alice, not Ferran and Heston.
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