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The difference between avant garde cuisine and art


Pan

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feels like shuffling ideas... which is good, people talking, sharing. What AVANT-GARDE means? Really? Favouring new and unusal ideas.

I went to Noma( Copenhagen) the other day and I was served a siphoned soup with mushroom emulsion and fresh truffle. On one side of the dish, submerged by the foam, there was a pumpking pure and half floating hazelnut. The dish reminded me of summer days, sea shores and sexy ladies...but, with a touch of melancholy (perhaps due to the lousy weather outside!), and then a rhyme from David Sylvian breezed through my mind:" the sound of waves in a pool of water/ I'm drowning in my nostalgia":

ok! serving empty dishes, even if named 4'33'', want tell much if you're there to eat.

Eating pig's ears isn't " that" sexy either! Who'll be the judge to draw the line?

Alessandro

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Who'll be the judge to draw the line?

Posterity. Many of the greatest innovators and artists are not really recognized as such during their lifetimes or at least during their peak creativity. Picasso and Adria are examples of innovators who were and are recognized as such during their lives.

John Sconzo, M.D. aka "docsconz"

"Remember that a very good sardine is always preferable to a not that good lobster."

- Ferran Adria on eGullet 12/16/2004.

Docsconz - Musings on Food and Life

Slow Food Saratoga Region - Co-Founder

Twitter - @docsconz

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[...]

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

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.

I didn't list the specific restaurant because I didn't want to imply I thought a specific place was 'bad', especially since I am a big fan of the chef and his art. I just wasn't happy leaving a restaurant feeling like I had a $200 appitizer.

The restaurant in question was Per Se in New York.

"Instead of orange juice, I'm going to use the juice from the inside of the orange."- The Brilliant Sandra Lee

http://www.matthewnehrlingmba.com

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In this thread I'm seeing what are perhaps coincidences or perhaps veiled references to two concepts that have previously been discussed here at eGullet.

One... the "blind" restaurant where everything is served completely and totally in the dark

Dans le Noir thread

Easy to find. The second idea, the notion of a conceptual restaurant where empty plates etc. comprised the entire experience, took some hard core Googling to find and sure enough... my search eventually brought me right back here (I was reasonably certain I'd read about it here in the first place.)

Cafe Ke'Ilu ( the "As If" restaurant)

Personally.... it all boils down to what I'm willing to spend my time and money for. A few years ago I went to the New Museum in NYC and saw an exhibit that included, among other things, "Air Above a Pedestal" and "Feces On a Pedestal". Sure enough, the former was self descriptive and the latter was a speck of dried feces smaller than the head of a common pin - both exhibited on rather mundane wooden pedestals painted white.

Did I feel gypped, having paid to get into the exhibit? No not at all... there were other works of art in the show that truly took what most of us consider to be artistic "talent". This thread prompted me to look up the artist, a "minimalist conceptual artist" named Sol Lewitt.

His Sentences on Conceptual Art includes many ideas that are very apropos to this discussion regarding avant garde cuisine (with only 35 sentences it's a very fast read).

I find the opening statement to be most intriguing...

Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.

To me... that contains the essence of why I have respect for some of the more talented avant garde artists of any discipline, including cuisine. As a highly logical sort I truly appreciate witnessing or experiencing the sorts of expression that other more creative and less logical folks sometimes create. I suppose I'm not wired that way, lack the vision or perhaps can't make the leap of faith necessary to express myself in that way. Regardless... I'm usually unwilling to avoid potentially disappointing experiences and risk missing one of those transcendent moments that the right aesthetic experience can provide for the onlooker or particpant.

Whether I'll consider it worthwhile to spend my precious time and limited financial resources to appreciate their art is an entirely different story and contingent on context and my circumstances.

But I wish I had the time to hop in the car and drive the five hours to Manhattan to see "The Gates" (which, by the way, is free of charge for the public and was entirely self-funded by the artist).

I prefer to remain open-minded enough to reserve judgment on most things until I actually experience them. That includes "The Gates".

Would I take a few days out of my vacation schedule and spend the time and money necessary to visit El Bulli? Most likely not due to the limited amounts I possess of each of those precious resources. Will I incorporate a visit to Alinea into a long weekend trip to Chicago in which I'll have many other things on my agenda? Quite likely.

But ultimately... for me... if the food doesn't taste amazingly good it's not worth it.

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But ultimately...  for me...  if the food doesn't taste amazingly good it's not worth it.

This is no doubt true, but the interesting thing is what I find amazingly good and what my parents found amazingly good were, despite considerable overlap, very, very different. I have been exposed to and thus enjoy so much more than they did. This includes not only ethnic cuisines outside of their own sphere of ethnicity, but avant-garde cuisines as well. My parents, although world travelers, would never have conceived of traveling anywhere just to experience the food - no matter who cooked it. It is not that they didn't appreciate good food. They did. It was just that what they considered "good" food was relatively limited.

John Sconzo, M.D. aka "docsconz"

"Remember that a very good sardine is always preferable to a not that good lobster."

- Ferran Adria on eGullet 12/16/2004.

Docsconz - Musings on Food and Life

Slow Food Saratoga Region - Co-Founder

Twitter - @docsconz

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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... 

I don't have time now for a discussion of "what is art" (I'm not sure I've ever had enough time for such a discussion :smile: ). But I can tell you that when Christo wrapped the islands in Biscayne Bay in Miami in pink plastic - it was a beautiful sight/event (or series of events - because everyone and his mother who had an office on a high floor of a high rise overlooking Biscayne Bay had a cocktail party to look at it!). Robyn

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Sometimes I think artistic cuisine is more about the communication of sensation and emotion through the medium of a food product. Nourishment and satiation (is that a word?) seem like they are just another sensation that most cuisine provides. If the chef/artist means for us to feel less full via the use of absence as part of a meal, sometimes that is conscious decisionmaking at work. The pizza stamp at Trio, for instance, made one think of the sensations and flavors of pizza and made the recipient keenly aware of the absence of the big slice of pizza, both in the mind and in the gut.

I'm under the impression that food is very powerful in that it can directly assert control over the eater's experience - the textures and flavors are experienced with incredible immediacy, it's difficult to be passive about it. In contemporary cuisine, we see control over the eating experience with increased specificity, through technology and technique artists can assert increased control over the final product.

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art is creativity.

art is a hamburger.

art is a taco.

art is heirloom tomatoes over hearts of palm sorbet with fried capers.

art is a plate.

an empty plate is not art.

all things created are "artistic" based on experience and a stroke of indescribable genius. you cant put your finger on this. media and commercialism dont allow for "closet artists" so its all in your face. prominence may not be acheived untill ones death beacause people study the past. the one with the best work gets recognized because as we evolve we build on the works of those before us.

Just because adria or achatz is actually doing something unseen or heard of yet does not mean it has not been conceptualized by someone else. they simply got credit. Original thought is completely debateable. They have the means to experiment and play with their food.

necessity breeds invention, avant garde is simply a chefs' need to be original. you either have it or you dont. alot of chefs are perfectly content COPYING anothers work instead of questioning it and finding out why and then creating something new. ALL artists are inspiring, unfortunately sometimes even the copy-cats are percieved to be as such, just because they put some money on the table and got their name out there.

The complexity of flavor is a token of durable appreciation. Each Time you taste it, each time it's a different story, but each time it's not so different." Paul Verlaine

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I'm very interested in the issues this thread raises, not least because I spend a great deal of my time working with avant-garde music, which will obviously color what I'm about to say. First a historical point - to me it never makes sense to talk of 'the avantgarde' in any art form, as it implies it is a homogenous movement. Cage's experimental avant-garde starts from fundamentally different premises to Boulez's modernist avant-garde, not that they don't have certain assumptions in common - iconoclasm, most notably - and influences on each other. Cage was ultimately interested in challenging our idea of what music was, Boulez in extending the content of a pre-existing notion of music. Likewise, Gagnaire's approach to cooking seems very different to Adria's, one constantly finding radical ways to treat a single - traditional - central ingredient, the other playing games with how we percieve what things will taste like. I'm sure this is an oversimplication, as my example with music was, but I think the point I want to make is that the avantgarde should, by its nature, be very resistant to classification or definition.

I wonder if the truly experimental avantgarde really exists in food? I'm yet to eat at the Fat Duck, El Bulli or Moto, say (that commitment to avantgarde art plays havoc with the dining budget sometimes), but my feeling is that while they seek to bring radical technique and presentation to their food, they simply won't serve something that bears no resemblance to the food people are used to paying for. And that brings us to an economic crux, restaurants need customers, ultimately, and can't afford to alienate them in ways that I, say, am quite comfortable to do to my audience, such as it is....

I do think I probably look for different things in food and in the (other??) arts to be honest. I certainly like to challenged and extended by both, but I expect food to be part of an entertainment and value its interactive social function, whereas the music, painting, literature are rather more something for contemplation. Again, perhaps this is partly economic - a novel costs me a few pounds, a concert ticket rarely more than that, most of the galleries in London are free, and I'm consuming, if not nothing, very little except vast quantities of time. Food is rather another matter...

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First a historical point - to me it never makes sense to talk of 'the avantgarde' in any art form, as it implies it is a homogenous movement.

To imagine an artist who's going to say: "I want to produce avant-garde art instead of normal art " is somehow a comical, no?

I still feel very uncomfortable about the food as art paradigm. Historically, I believe the first "chef as artist" portrayed by media is Robuchon and the concept was introduced by his nuntius on earth, Patricia Wells. Ironically, Robuchon was a perfectionistic neo-classic and for sure not "avant-garde".

Again, perhaps this is partly economic - a novel costs me a few pounds, a concert ticket rarely more than that, most of the galleries in London are free, and I'm consuming, if not nothing, very little except vast quantities of time. Food is rather another matter...

The "food=art" notion has ideologial aspects as well, because ideological work aims at masking profane mechanisms and economical interests. The notion of art has always been a preferred method to achieve this.

Edited by Boris_A (log)

Make it as simple as possible, but not simpler.

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...art is a plate.

an empty plate is not art...

I've been to a lot of restaurants where the plates were more interesting than the food on them.

Although I prefer restaurants where the food is worthy of the plates - and vice versa. Robyn (design addict)

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...I still feel very uncomfortable about the food as art paradigm. Historically, I believe the first "chef as artist" portrayed by media is Robuchon and the concept was introduced by his nuntius on earth, Patricia Wells. Ironically,  Robuchon was a perfectionistic neo-classic and for sure not "avant-garde".

...Again, perhaps this is partly economic - a novel costs me a few pounds, a concert ticket rarely more than that, most of the galleries in London are free, and I'm consuming, if not nothing, very little except vast quantities of time. Food is rather another matter...

I disagree about Robuchon. I first ate at Jamin over 20 years ago when it had one Michelin star. What he was doing then might not have been shocking - like Duchamp's urinal. And - although it was certainly stuff that looked like food - it certainly wasn't traditional French cuisine. I'm not sure how much deviation from the mean is required to call something "avant garde" - but I think Robuchon's cuisine back then qualified. By the way - I don't think Patricia Wells was joined at the hip with Robuchon then - I don't recall the 2 names ever being mentioned in the same sentence.

I do agree with your sentiments concerning the financial differences between food and the other arts. And - in fact - I think I had a similar discussion with several people here when discussing a possible trip to the Fat Duck. I love to experiment when it comes to art - music - literature - and - to a lesser extent- theater - because theater can be pretty expensive. And not only are you talking about a much smaller investment in terms of money - you're also talking about a lot less time. If I walk into a gallery to see an exhibit of works by a new artist - and I absolutely hate it - I can walk out in 5 minutes. If I love it - I can stick around for an hour or two. You can't do that with high end restaurants.

Note that are some things that seem so compelling to me in the arts that I will go out of my way to see them (like the Louisiana Museum in Denmark or the Nasher Museum in Dallas). But these places are few and far between - and I usually know enough about them before I visit them to know that I won't be disappointed. Robyn

P.S. This is a really a response to 2 different messages. Got the quotes jumbled up.

Edited by robyn (log)
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To imagine an artist who's going to say: "I want to produce avant-garde art instead of normal art " is somehow a comical, no?[...]

It doesn't strike me as necessarily comical, and I'm not sure what you're getting at.

Michael aka "Pan"

 

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I think what Boris is suggesting is that it is strange for an artist to set out to create 'avantgarde' art, rather than whatever kind of art it is they actually want to create, regardless of whether or not it is 'avantgarde'. That said I have certainly met and worked with many self-declared avantgarde composers, and it isn't always a pretty sight...

I very much agree with Boris about the issue of ideology, too. For me the greatest power of the arts is to engage with broader metaphysical/philosphical/political/spiritual/emotional issues, and I don't know if food has that, it is simply an incredible pleasure, certainly something to be thought about, by all means, but rather on its own terms...

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Sometimes, I believe, the author doesn't even care whether it's art or not. For example, when Cartier-Bresson started with his photography, was this documentary, photojournalism or art? All I know is that HCB never liked to talk about his pictures. I assume, he didn't care. Why should he?

And the few artists I personally know are not interested in a categorizing of their works.

"Everyone is an artist", postulated Joseph Beuys. In this sense, tonight I'm going to interpret an oeuvre of classic food art, tagliatelle al pomodoro. :rolleyes:

Make it as simple as possible, but not simpler.

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"It is not important if the audience knows if I am serious or joking, just as it is not important if I know if I am serious or joking"

-Salvador Dali

One who is truly dedicated to his art won't care about the classification of aforementioned art. One who runs a business must take into consideration the perceived value to the clientele. That becomes the line which chefs must walk, those who do not have one of the dozen or so easily recognized names. If chefs were comissioned to make a plate by a client and could dedicate months to it's evolution perhaps empty plates would be the end result, but that would be a pure statement of art (and more importantly, the artist), rather than the artistic evolution of food into the satisfaction that only food can bring.

Have you ever met an artist or chef who wasn't interested the work as an expression either of the component of the work, or an expression of themselves? I've not, and either course can lead to great work, but their are major differences between those who are looking to express themselves, and those who are looking to get out of the way, and let the work speak for itself.

"It is just as absurd to exact excellent cooking from a chef whom one provides with defective or scanty goods, as to hope to obtain wine from a bottled decoction of logwood." -Escoffier
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My husband is a chef. I've seen students watch him demonstrating how to tourne a potato with awe. At that moment a humble spud is a work of art to them. I've heard customer's gasp at a very simple plate of fish and say "that's a work of art, unbelievably simple".

He has the technical skills to do towers and extravagant garnishes. He doesn't though, not his style. A chef can be an artist. Food can be art. But a chef's artistic food preparations have to be first and foremost edible and damn good tasting. A chef/artist is unlike other artists. It's a trade, craft, of course art, he has to be a strong leader in the kitchen, watch the bottom line (yeah, yeah I've heard a few chefs claim they weren't even thinking about money or costs when they did this or that. What they are not telling you is they knew they could make plenty of money with other ventures after the built a name), train staff to follow his precise instructions, develop menus, create signature dishes, be innovative and creative...

Wow, how many other "artists" have to do this day and day out? One mistake with the wrong customer and it can get written up allover egullet. :laugh:

I've seen the "power" that great food can have on people. I'm no longer astounded by the number of students and customers my husband has that tell him "I love you" after a meal or a class. Total strangers saying this. :blink:

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