John Whiting
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For better or for worse, art schools provide much less formal training than they used to. Life drawing, still life, drawing articulated skeletons – these are skills which, in many academies, are no longer considered necessary. Other more technological studies are likely to take their place.
The result is that artists are liable to leave college with a narrower range of formal skills and concepts to ultilize – or to revolt against! It is virtually inevitable that art should become more and more conceptual, offering an idea – usually as encapsulated as a TV ad – rather than a worked-out process. Since the audience they are addressing has been educated primarily by TV ads, this makes for instant communication. The medium has become the message even more universally and fundamentally than Marshall McLuhan might have foreseen. Thus a pile of bricks is as pregnant with significance as a bar of soap or a can of beans.
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The trouble is, both love and mustard can easily take over."A tale without love is like beef without mustard: insipid".
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Bux puts his finger on a crucial point. I can't think of another area of expertise in which it is demanded that a reviewer, a critic or a commentator not be personally known to his subject. Books are commonly -- and rightly -- reviewed by other authors who are the books' authors' best friends or sworn enemies. In the arts and sciences, a reviewer who hasn't met and formed a relationship with its principal practitioners is likely to be so peripheral to the scene as to be insensitive to its nuances. If you undertake to speak with authority, there is no such thing as too much knowledge; the determining factor is how you use it.
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I've no wish to revive this morbid feast of necrophilia, but anyone who is interested in the Martha Stewart phenomenon should go to John Thorne's _Outlaw Cook_, pp265-74. He doesn't so much butcher her as serve her up as exquisite nouvelle cuisine, basted with her own sauce.
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It takes a certain mentality to be happy in a one-man kitchen far from the urban centers. I couldn't help thinking of Shaun Hill, Ludlow's solitary chef who is so well thought of by everyone, both for his cooking and for himself.
Steven, your report must be almost as good as the real thing, and so much less calorific!
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In England, vinegar is commonly used.My father taught me how to make mustard using Colman's powder when I was around six or seven. Sometimes we used water, other times milk. -
I think that macrosan means (well anyway, *I* mean) that in a pre-flavored mustard the ratio between the mustard and its flavorings remains the same. One might want to alter it, for instance, between two sausages, one mild, one strongly spicy.the argument doesn't wash with me because I can usually taste both the additive and the underlying ingredient as seperate layers. . . -
Re Goldsworthy: I haven't kept up. I was introduced to his work years ago by Ann Hartree of Edinburgh, who was acting as his agent. Nobody had heard of him and he was working on a very modest scale -- his lonely constructs looked as though nature had produced some utterly remarkable accident. Since then he's become famous, and I wouldn't be surprised if relative prosperity has enlarged his horizons. If he builds the Taj Mahal out of birchbark, I don't want to know about it.
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Right. And the "reality" continues in the extensive photographing which usually accompanies such projects.As I said about Christo, when he wraps the Pont Neuf, it isn't intended to last for ever. And when it disappears, it disappears in reality, not in concept. He can always wrap it again.Another example is Andy Goldsworthy, the creator of truly beautiful structures made of leaves, twigs, ice and other fragile materials, usually in isolated locations. He photographs them and the photos then become a permanent record of the ephemeral.
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I tend to agree. It's not that these specialist mustards don't taste good, it's just that every time you use one the food tastes exactly the same. I like Helen Sawyer's book because it's a useful guide to varying flavors, even of mustards that have already been made up.I don't like the idea of these packaged convenience additives.I keep several balsamic vinegars on hand for the same reason. (I can only afford the middle-priced varieties.)
Perhaps I bore easily.
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Sorry, I'm too old to cut the mustard.eat it with a spoon, eat it with a fork, eat it on bread...I'm surprised no one has mentioned making their own. The Mustard Store website contains loads of information, including reference to Helen Sawyer's excellent _Gourmet Mustards_. I gave my copy to the SF Chronicle's Marlena Spieler, and she's hotter than ever!
And there's Coleman's English mustard, available either as a powder or mixed. This is ferocious stuff, but a country (the US) that's gone mad on lethal chiles ought to lap it up.
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I’m forced to retreat even further. Looking up “Cookery” within another context, I find the following in Alan Davidson’s _Oxford Companion to Food_:
“SKILL, ART OR SCIENCE? This question is sometimes posed. The answer must be that cookery can be any or all of these; it depends on who is cooking, in what context, and for what purpose.
“The language used in medieval cookery texts (mostly manuscripts) is consonant with the skill view. Yet there is also a touch of what would now be called ‘science’ in some of them, because they assume that the choice of foods and combinations of foods is a branch of medicine, or at least a close ally thereof; see GALEN and FOUR HUMOURS.
“Next, the art view. This necessarily has to be combined with the skill view. If cookery is an art, then according to the normal usage of the terms ‘art’ and ‘artist, it is only done well and properly by a limited number of people—corresponding in practice to the great chefs of the time. They are the artists, who stand out like mountaintops among the foothills. Lower down come the vast majority of the practitioners, who go through similar but less complicated and subtle motions in their kitchens, and who are no more than artisans.” [Note Davidson’s condescending use of this word.]
He then goes on to trace this view through history, and then deals with the science view, culminating in Harold McGee. The final summing up reads:
“The 20th century has seen, on the whole, an increasing tendency to treat the most prominent chefs as artists. At the same time, however, the works of McGee and others . . . have reminded readers that much of the art displayed has to rest on a scientific basis. And, of course, the vast majority of people have continued their lives on the tacit assumption that cookery is a skill, which some people have more than others.”
In other words, whether you choose to call a chef an artist or an artisan or a scientist or an entertainer – or a charlatan - you will find a substantial number of people who agree with you. Who am I to argue with Alan Davidson?
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Found objects are not art. They may imitate art, but that's about it.
Sorry, but Marcel Duchamp's urinal, signed "R. Mutt", disposed of this distinction once and for all.
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I’m going to retract most of what I’ve written about art and start again. We’ve travelled so far from the root meaning of the word that I had forgotten it. It comes from the Latin word “ars”, which, according to Lewis’ Latin Dictionary, means simply “practical skill”. Skeat’s _Etymological Dictionary _ says that the word in its present spelling, derived from the genitive “artis”, first appeared in Middle English and means "skill, contivance or method". The _New Oxford Dictionary_ of 1993 begins its long list of definitions as follows: “1 Skill as the result of knowledge and practice. b Technical or professional skill. c Human skill, as opposed to nature.” Then comes “2. The learning of the schools; scholarship.” Only after this root meaning does it go on to include “3 The application of skill according to aesthetic principals.”
The word “artist” starts out with a similarly broad application, but jumps straight into the realm of scholarship: “1 A person who is master of the liberal arts; a learned person. 2. A person who is a master of a practical science or pursuit; a medical practitioner, astrologer, astronomer, alchemist , professor of occult sciences, chemist, etc.” Only at this point does a modern connotation enter the picture: “3 A person who cultivates or practices one of the fine arts, now esp. painting.” Well down the list comes “6=artisan. obs. A person who makes his or her craft a fine art. M17.” – in other words, obsolete since the middle of the 17th century.
So we may refer comfortably to "the art of cookery", but we should be aware that, if we also insist on assigning the label “artist” to a chef, we are going back to a usage of the word not current for 350 years. My own feeling is that “art” and “artist” are words whose usefulness diminishes if we attempt to broaden their definition so widely as to make them even more ambiguous than they already are. They should not be epithets of status bestowed on a craft or occupation merely as a seal of approval. Otherwise, we are into the indiscriminate world of Alice in Wonderland, in which “all shall have prizes”.
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Macrosan, your posting is so full of misreadings and self-contradictions that I haven't time to deal with them. "Art" and "good art" are not synonymous. Any logical structure which doesn't start from that fundamental fact topples of its own accord.
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We are trying to reach a consensus where none is required. Does it matter whether cookery is an art? Only if one assigns to art an inflated and irrelevant importance. One may say enthusiastically, "That meal was a work of art!" It doesn't have to be defensible as philosophical truth, anymore than the statement, "I'd drive a thousand miles for a meal like that!" must be followed by a demonstration of its veracity.
In other words, we should allow ourselves our enthusiastic exaggerations without being required to logically defend them. We know which of our friends delight in hyperbole and so can easily determine the ration between their enthusiasm and their discrimination.
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Steve, you demand a lot more of a meal than I do -- something wonderful every time! -- but I like your attitude. I'm content with quiet simple pleasures, providing that they're actually pleasurable. Once in a while I have an experience such as I've had twice in a few months at l'Astrance, where the food, the ambience and the companionship -- to describe it as service is to denigrate it -- all come together. I've mentioned on another thread somewhere my experience of a menu degustation together with a chamber music concert, organized and cooked by a chef who had already at that point become a friend.
These things happen once in a while. I don't go deliberately searching for them, and so I'm content to let my most common culinary pleasure be puting something together out of what was in the fridge and the larder that makes my wife smile.
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Steve and I might come to blows over analog sound recording, but in this fundamental matter we build on the same firm foundation. When I "did" aesthetics at UC Berkeley with Karl Aschenbrenner, the first cliché we had to unpack was, "I don't know anything about art, but I know what I like." The flip side of that spinning coin is, "What I like is art, what I don't like isn't." The identification of art with personal preference makes all subsequent discussion circular and irresolvable.
It's interesting that all the cooks so far cited as artists have been professional chefs working in restaurants. So we have at least assumed that these "artists" are *career* artists, doing it for money. Someone will immediately insist that such-and-such a domestic cook is also an artist; my point is simply that we have thus far assumed professional status. The notable exception is our quoted Zen Master, but Zen is by self-declaration outside the discipline of philosophy and aesthetics, and so is free to use the word "art" in any way it chooses, including the paradoxical.
Any object which is put on display primarily to be purchased or looked at is art. A dead animal is art if it's displayed in a museum between two glass plates; if it's served up on a single glass plate in order to be consumed, it isn't. But take that glass plate to a museum, and it *is* art.
There's an interesting borderline area. Our neighbor across the street is one of the world's leading makers of food for photography and display. Her job is to make objects which look exactly like food which is about to be eaten, however fragile, but to make it permanent. The object of her craft is, in fact, deception.
Is she an artist? Her work is on permanent display all over the world. We are into the paradoxical world of forgery. What is the status of something which pretends to be what it isn't? The label which one places on her will be problematical until a museum curator somewhere decides that her work is so remarkable that examples of it should be brought together and displayed, not to represent something else, but as, in fact, art objects in their own right. At that point she will unambiguously and unequivocally become an artist. Perhaps someday she will be called upon to reproduce the towering structures served up by celebrity chefs in fashionable restaurants. The chefs themselves will be artists only if they design these dishes explicitly for display and then commission our neighbor to make them; at that point she will once again be demoted to craftsperson, like the workers in bronze who made the sculptures of Rodin under his supervision.
(Are my culinary perigrinations art? It's ambiguous; I've been known to eat my words.
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There is a traditional and useful distinction between arts and crafts. The Arts and Crafts Movement which centered around William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites understood this perfectly. They realized that art is the result of activity which is carried on primarily for its own sake, rather than for some extraneous purpose. (Architecture is the one usual exception.) The definition relates to the purpose of the activity, not the quality -- bad art is still art.
Crafts, on the other hand, are essentially useful activities which may nevertheless be refined to a high level of aesthetic pleasure. Insisting on the "art" of cooking opens up the word to use by any skilled activity or trade that wishes merely to honor its own practitioners. It also leads to long and useless wrangles over whether a given craftsperson is "good enough" to be called an artist. Someone, I have no doubt, is writing a treatise on the Art of Tiddleywinks.
Steve's paragraph, quoted above, is absolutely correct. Any attempt to tie the word "art" to any qualitative standard, takes us into a Looking Glass world in which words may be made to mean whatever we like.
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I've looked at the UniChef website. It took me some time to convince myself that it was real. There's hardly a sentence that would not qualify for Private Eye's notorious Pseud's Corner. If I ever decide to go on a serious diet, a daily visit to this Compendium Cliché Production will keep my food aversion at a functional level.
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From time to time I enjoy being pleasantly surprised at table, but I make no demands of originality. In culinary matters, most of the world's population, including its artists, its intellectuals and its artisans, have prized, above all else, familiarity. Cookery is traditionally a cooperative rather than a competitive activity; only when food was drawn into the orbit of free enterprise did uniqueness come to be valued above comfort and reassurance. Thus the ridiculous excesses of extravagance and grotesquerie, which were once confined to aristocratic tables, are now to be seen in public eating places. Next will come the Culinary Olympics, in which the world's chefs vie with each other in accordance with some arbitrary and impossible set of irrelevant standards.
So is a particular dish "art"? Yes, if its maker says it is. Any useful definition must be descriptive rather than qualitative: art, as Marshall McLuhan pointed out, is whatever you can get away with.
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I have just spoken to a very well known music critic I know and he tells me that a certain very well known music magazine ( think one letter title here ) Magazine have a policy of never giving certain "key" acts less than 4* for any album because their record company would not spend the advertising revenue on which they depend.
The world of classical music is hardly free of influence or even corruption; nevertheless, such a policy would be unthinkable in any of the relevant English or American periodicals I'm familiar with.
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Maybe *you're* getting old.
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The Futurist Cookbook was play, an entirely valid activity. Some of their foods were makable, others were not, but the distinction was irrelevant. The Futurist Cookbook, in other words, was a work of art.
As to whether a particular chef or school of cuisine is regarded as art or craft, this is partly a question of how decadent is the society which is assigning the label. "Craft" was quite good enough for Chaucer: "The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne. . ."
Cf. the Balinese quotation which John Cage was so fond of: "We don't have any art, we just try to do everything as well as we can."
Is cooking an art?
in Food Traditions & Culture
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