The difference between avant garde cuisine and art

[Pan]

In the Christo and the Gates thread in the New York Forum, Bux wrote:

". . .  it is only a work of art," said Christo [referring to his answer when people ask him what's the use of his "gates"]. Wereas a good meal is dinner?[...]

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Telling point, Bux. Perhaps a good meal would be most apt to be considered "art" by the art world if it were wrapped in large quantities of pink plastic by someone claiming thereby to be an artist. "Avant garde" food still has to fulfill a requirement of edibility, by contrast with some of today's so-called avant garde art (which I'd call post-avant-garde), which can be absolutely anything someone claims is art, including (at a 70s show in the Guggenheim in New York) a year's supply of used toilet paper by the "artist." Standards like edibility for food seem to me to limit the boundaries of the culinary arts in ways in which nothing at all limits the "fine arts." And as a musical example, I "played" a shortened version of John Cage's 4'33" in my Music Appreciation classes this week -- a "piece" in which the "performer" does not play a note. It provoked an interesting discussion -- none of my students considered it music, nor do I, but it is generally so considered by scholars. Imagine, by analogy, going to a restaurant for a "meal," during which you were served no food or drink but given empty dishes and silverware while the staff pretended to give you things to eat and drink, then expected you to pay for real at the end. Would anyone consider that "cuisine" or credit the chef with anything worth a damn?! Can you imagine a statement analogous to this one?

American Masters: John Cage (PBS)

The piece 4'33'' written by John Cage, is possibly the most famous and imortant [sic] piece in twentieth century avant-garde.

A "piece" with no music, the most important piece on any level?

Some of you may violently disagree that most of what's called "avant garde art" nowadays and in the last 30 years or so (though the Cage dates back to 1952) is bullshit, but I wonder how many of you would agree with me that the need for edibility creates limits on just how far cuisine can go in the direction of total nonsense. I think that that utilitarian grounding to the sense of taste is a positive point for the art of cuisine by comparison with the state of boundarylessness the fine arts are in nowadays.

[Gifted Gourmet]

I wonder how many of you would agree with me that the need for edibility creates limits on just how far cuisine can go in the direction of total nonsense. I think that that utilitarian grounding to the sense of taste is a positive point for the art of cuisine by comparison with the state of boundarylessness the fine arts are in nowadays.

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I, for one, am in complete agreement with you on these statements, Pan. What passes for avant-garde in many areas (fashion being prime among them), is nothing more or less than sheer narcissism by the 'creator' .. be it food or art or music or film. I do thank you for saying this! And, while innovative is fine when accompanied by solid grounding, as you state, much of it wanders around looking for a sustained, appreciative audience.

[lielow]

. Imagine, by analogy, going to a restaurant for a "meal," during which you were served no food or drink but given empty dishes and silverware while the staff pretended to give you things to eat and drink, then expected you to pay for real at the end. Would anyone consider that "cuisine" or credit the chef with anything worth a damn?! Can you imagine a statement analogous to this one?

It' s funny you're saying that, last night, here in Copenhagen, we were discussing the menu for our restaurant, and a question rose: Is it that dining out has became a mondane act of edonistic pleasure? Therefore, would an empty dish will be accepted as the latest food experience? (and paid for!)....

[Boris_A]

Therefore, would an empty dish will be accepted as the latest food experience? (and paid for!)....

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Depends on the chef who prepare it, I guess.

[Shalmanese]

I disagree that avant garde art has no limitations. Avant garde fashion still has to roughly fit the human body, avant garde sculptures still have to conform to the rules of physics. et cetera et cetera.

And despite the common perception that avant garde is just a pile of random crap piled together in which critics randomly dispense either praise or criticism, good avant garde (which isn't neccesarily popular avant garde) still has to challenge the human psyche and give us a mirror into the world and ourselves and provoke contemplation.

I don't see how food differs from other disciplines in this regard.

[chefzadi]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor..._ot/the_gates_1

Two quotes from this article

Bloomberg:

"I can't promise, particularly since this is New York, that everyone will love 'The Gates,' but I guarantee that they will all talk about it," Bloomberg said Friday at a news conference with the artists. "And that's really what innovative, provocative art is supposed to do."

Christo:

"It's very difficult," explained Christo. "You ask us to talk. This project is not involving talk. It's a real, physical space. It's not necessary to talk. You spend time, you experience the project."

The French artist hasn't changed his line in a hundred years!

[lielow]

provoke contemplation.

could an empty dish, somehow, provoke contemplation?

[Gifted Gourmet]

could an empty dish, somehow, provoke contemplation?

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If it were me, the better term might be 'consternation' .... empty dishes don't say avant-garde to me ... they say 'cheap' ...

my 5,000th post and it is about empty plates on a food website ... go figure!!

[ghostrider]

provoke contemplation.

could an empty dish, somehow, provoke contemplation?

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Of course it could.

But only a sucker would pay for it.

[chefzadi]

How about empty dishes in a totally dark restaurant with a blind FOH.

[Gifted Gourmet]

How about empty dishes in a totally dark restaurant with a blind FOH. 

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Goes with my empty wallet ... but, isn't that so incredibly esoteric that someone will just have to give it a try, chefzadi?

[chefzadi]

provoke contemplation.

could an empty dish, somehow, provoke contemplation?

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Of course it could.

But only a sucker would pay for it.

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The sucker also pays for lots of little vegetable "dusts" and dollops of "essences" lining the perimeter of a plate like a painter's palette. The flavors of so much dust and drippings arguably not contributing to the main ingredient. Assembly line cooking, lot's of little keebler elf fingers making the plate look pretty. The towers have fallen, but the extraneous garnishes are still there.

But hey if the diner at that moment "experiences" food as art or art as food maybe it's money well spent for "jouissance."

[chefzadi]

How about empty dishes in a totally dark restaurant with a blind FOH. 

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Goes with my empty wallet ... but, isn't that so incredibly esoteric that someone will just have to give it a try, chefzadi?

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I'm practicing my press spin already!

Extra heavy French accent here "Well you inseest I talk. How to talk about an expeRIENCE of what eez not there. To understand what eez there one must epxerience eet's absence. You're inseestance on talk is fueld by the ennui of those who eat too much and are blinder than the blind"

[lielow]

[chefzadi]

A Derridian press spin:

The center of the plate is unstable, it does not hold. That which is signified is between the lines, in the courses in between the next courses, where there is silence and the table setting is void. So the course is a plate and we look to the margins, the perimeter, the rim of the plate, we see the other that which has been silenced so long by an unstable center. So now the rim is on the center of plate.

Here's your empty plate. Did you say, check please?"

Do you have another egullet "contest" here?

[slkinsey]

Imagine, by analogy, going to a restaurant for a "meal," during which you were served no food or drink but given empty dishes and silverware while the staff pretended to give you things to eat and drink, then expected you to pay for real at the end. Would anyone consider that "cuisine" or credit the chef with anything worth a damn?! Can you imagine a statement analogous to this one?

This is, I assume, in response to Pan's mention of John Cage's (in)famous piece 4'33"

It is unfortunately not an apt comparison. Music is all about the fundamental act of listening, although there are peripheral elements such as watching the musicians, eetc. Without listening there is no music. Music consists of periods of created sound and periods of not-created-sound. Cage's piece was designed to explode the whole concept of "what is music," to get people to "listen to the silence" and to get them to understand that silence isn't silent. What Cage did not do with 4'33" was take away the listening. I would argue, by the way, that although 4'33" is an interesting piece of conceptual art, it is not particularly interesting or successful as a piece of music.

Dining, on the other hand, is all about the fundamental act of eating. It is impossible to make a "4'33" of food" because once you take away the eating it is no longer dining. It's like taking away the listening from music. Once you do that, it's not music.

To directly address your point, I can very well see how art patrons would pay to go into ADNY where they would be served and consume a meal of nothing... if this "meal" were presented by a conceptual artist as a piece of performance art. But that is what it would be. Art, not dining. As dining, this "meal" would fail in much the same way that 4'33" fails as a piece of music.

[Pan]

I disagree that avant garde art has no limitations. Avant garde fashion still has to roughly fit the human body,

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Fashion has clear utilitarian limitations, like cuisine.

avant garde sculptures still have to conform to the rules of physics.[...]

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That's an involuntary limitation. Everything conforms to the laws of physics! So I respectfully decline to see that "limitation" as having any real relevance to this discussion.

And despite the common perception that avant garde is just a pile of random crap piled together in which critics randomly dispense either praise or criticism, good avant garde (which isn't neccesarily popular avant garde) still has to challenge the human psyche and give us a mirror into the world and ourselves and provoke contemplation.

I don't see how food differs from other disciplines in this regard.

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It probably doesn't. We could argue about whether the avant garde movement in the fine arts in fact ended when there were no more rules to break, but my main point really relates to the limitations on bad avant-garde (or so-called "avant garde") fine art vs. cuisine. As a matter of fact, I think there was plenty of excellent avant garde work in all the fine arts, but I believe that the bulk of the greatest of it was already finished in the 50s or 60s and since then, there have been some good, even great artists in every field, but the lack of boundaries or a consensus on what constitutes art, let alone good art, has meant that, with the assault on previously-inviolate rules having long since been taken to the greatest extremes, we have a situation today of many people working in individual styles plus fashions in "art" being promoted by a critical establishment and a small number of very rich people (e.g. the Saatchis, as I understand), especially in media which require a great expenditure to collect. And this media-driven establishment is calling these fashions "avant garde." Is that analogous to the situation in cuisine? In some ways it is, but as has often been pointed out, even a $500 meal is nowhere near the expense of a $100,000 painting. In music, too, to the degree a ticket-paying audience is necessary, there's some insulation from the whims of critics in deciding what approved style will be the "avant garde" of today.

[Pan]

[...]To directly address your point, I can very well see how art patrons would pay to go into ADNY where they would be served and consume a meal of nothing... if this "meal" were presented by a conceptual artist as a piece of performance art.  But that is what it would be.  Art, not dining.  As dining, this "meal" would fail in much the same way that 4'33" fails as a piece of music.

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Fully agreed, Sam.

[ghostrider]

It is unfortunately not an apt comparison.  Music is all about the fundamental act of listening, although there are peripheral elements such as watching the musicians, eetc.  Without listening there is no music.  Music consists of periods of created sound and periods of not-created-sound.  Cage's piece was designed to explode the whole concept of "what is music," to get people to "listen to the silence" and to get them to understand that silence isn't silent.  What Cage did not do with 4'33" was take away the listening.  I would argue, by the way, that although 4'33" is an interesting piece of conceptual art, it is not particularly interesting or successful as a piece of music.

Dining, on the other hand, is all about the fundamental act of eating.  It is impossible to make a "4'33" of food" because once you take away the eating it is no longer dining.  It's like taking away the listening from music.  Once you do that, it's not music.

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Hmmm. I would argue that eating is all about the even more fundamental acts of tasting, smelling, and seeing.

Taking away the act of eating would simply be an effort to get people to taste/smell/see the emptiness.

Ferran Adria seems to be getting people to eat air; isn't this just the next logical step?

Not that I'd consider "eating the emptiness" a worthwhile act in any real sense. And I'd agree that it's dining only in whatever sense 4'33" may be music; both smack more of conceptual art than what they purport to be. But it would be interesting to see how many people you could get to pay for the experience.

[edsel]

I have to say that I'm a bit dismayed at the nay-saying and humbuggery on this thread. Sure there's a lot of chicanery on the art scene, but I'd hope that people would be a bit more open to provocative ideas. Everyone's free to declare an artistic endeavor as "crap", but I'd hope for at least a moment of reflection first.

Has anyone in the NYC area bothered to walk down to Central Park to experience Christo and Jeanne-Claude's 'Gates' project first-hand? I've been following it in media reports, and I'm seriously considering traveling to New York to experience it myself.

As for John Cage's more provocative pieces, I'll grant you that he was always a provocateur (I would say in the best sense), and he may have relished the pissed-off reactions he often attracted. When he and David Tudor did a residence at my college back in the early seventies, there were plenty of people who didn't "get" what they were doing, but I'd say a majority found their performances and lectures engaging to say the least. The highlight for me was performing in one of his "aleatoric" pieces ("Cartridge Music").

I'm forever disappointed that I missed out on another activity: Cage took a number of students (including several friends) on a mushroom hunting expedition. That's right, john Cage was a dedicated mycologist. Within walking distance of our dining hall they found an abundance of delicious wild mushrooms. Cage also collected a separate basket of "these will kill you" mushrooms which looked sufficiently similar to the good ones to put me off wild mushroom collecting for life...

As for the whole food-is-art/food-isn't-art debate, all I can say is that I'll approach it with an open mind. If Ferran Adrià choses to serve me a deep-fried fish skeleton (I should be so lucky!) I'm not going to whine about it not being a traditional idea of "food" - I'll laugh out loud and love the moment.

[Pan]

[...]Sure there's a lot of chicanery on the art scene, but I'd hope that people would be a bit more open to provocative ideas. Everyone's free to declare an artistic endeavor as "crap", but I'd hope for at least a moment of reflection first.[...]

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No disagreement there. I don't judge anything as crap if I haven't viewed or listened to the work, or at least other works by the artist. Even then, the same artist can sometimes create worthwhile works as well as crap. And I do like some of Cage's works, for example. But as you can see, my point has to do with the inherent limits on cuisine as compared with the lack of limits nowadays in the fine arts. The one probable exception is architecture, to the extent that that has a clear utilitarian purpose.

That's really interesting about Cage as a mycologist.

[docsconz]

Avant-garde is all about stretching boundaries. Yesterday's avant-garde is today's mainstream. The impressionists were initially reviled by the mainstream. Rock and Roll was considered subversive (maybe it is ) and nouvelle cuisine a flash in the pan! While the example of presenting empty plates is put forth as such an obvious disparagement of the concept taken to an extreme with cuisine, I am not so sure that it is so obvious. The assumption is that one eats nothing when given an empty plate. Why not eat the plate? The utensils? The menu? That's right, the menu at Moto is edible! Will it be good? Perhaps in the right creative hands.

[Mnehrling]

I have had the opportunity to dine at two 'Avant-garde' type restaurants and the experience was quite different for each.

The positive experience was Charlie Trotter's (I consider it Avant-garde but I realize others may not). Not only did his cuisine reach the level of high art, but I also felt that I had met my basic nutritional needs.

My negative experience was, to say the least interesting. I won't say the name because of my negative comments. I felt as though I spent a little over $200 per person on eating at a purfume counter. I am never happy with a meal when I don't feel even slightly satisified nutritionally at the end of the meal.

I feel that some chefs who have the freedom to follow the Avant-Garde route forget the basic function of food. While I have no problem with their expressing their freedom and art, I as a consumer would rather choose a place that I don't have to order a pizza after I eat.

This is just my opinion, flame away.

[Bux]

Avant-garde is all about stretching boundaries. Yesterday's avant-garde is today's mainstream. The impressionists were initially reviled by the mainstream. Rock and Roll was considered subversive (maybe it is ) and nouvelle cuisine a flash in the pan! While the example of presenting empty plates is put forth as such an obvious disparagement of the concept taken to an extreme with cuisine, I am not so sure that it is so obvious. The assumption is that one eats nothing when given an empty plate. Why not eat the plate? The utensils? The menu? That's right, the menu at Moto is edible! Will it be good? Perhaps in the right creative hands.

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Art that reinvents art, or at least revolutionizes it is Art. The rest is just culture. Adria may, or may not please your palate, but he is making chefs think about food in ways they haven't before and he's doing the same thing for diners. Hopefully, the eGullet forums can do the same thing in our own way.

[Pan]

[...]

My negative experience was, to say the least interesting.  I won't say the name because of my negative comments.[...]

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Unless you have a professional reason why you can't afford to be seen criticizing a restaurant, I wish you would tell us which one you're talking about. If anything, the lack of identification could be seen to possibly imply disparagement of several other restaurants you don't mean to criticize.