DINNER AT THE MUSEUM: CLIMBING THE PYRAMID OF NEEDS
Of all big words — love, God, beauty — art might be the hardest one to define. Of course, we each have our personal definitions of what art is, and equally important — as by their very nature, definitions are as much about exclusion as they are about inclusion — what it isn’t. Museum visits go hand in hand with fiery discussions about whether that white canvas belongs there, whether so-and-so’s baby brother or six-year-old niece or senile grandmother could have made this Pollock or that Mondrian, perhaps even better. But there is an important distinction to be made between definitions of art that seek to filter out the great, meaningful or transformative, and those more comprehensive, bringing the three-letter word back to a kind of human activity. In the latter category, the Oxford dictionary offers the following attempt: The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power. And, under the arts: The various branches of creative activity, such as painting, music, literature, and dance. So, art is creative, a product of human imagination, and seeks to please our senses or make us feel a certain way. The other question, that of quality, of whether Jackson Pollock is any good and if his paintings do or do not deserve to cost 200 million US dollars — that question is answered by the critic, by criticism: the other side of the equation, the flipside of the coin. For as long as art has been called art, the critic has been lurking in the shadows, drawing lines between right and wrong, between importance and banality. It is the critic who writes the rules of the game.
In the Maslow hierarchy of human needs, the arts are at the tip of the pyramid, the final tier, high above mere survival in the realm of self-actualisation. Except for that one elusive art form: culinary art. Food, of course, is a physiological need, located at the very bottom of the pyramid. It is, at the risk of offending anyone, the only art we truly cannot live without. Eating food, as such, is on no list of characteristics defining humanity, however. There was once a time when we, like all other species, ate the bounty of our surroundings in its pure, unchanged form. The idea of preparing food, cooking, is, on the other hand, distinctly and unmistakably human. Perhaps, then, the moment we learned how to control fire was the moment we came into our own. Perhaps, it was when we tossed a piece of meat onto the flames that we unleashed our culinary artistry. Perhaps — but it certainly didn’t end there. We measure our appreciation of ancient human creativity by a different standard. Looking at a cave painting, we tend to be interested in technique, we look for meaning with regard to what it can tell us about those who came before, but rarely do we scrutinise the banality of what we are shown, the simplicity of composition or the complete lack of perspective. Similarly, the four-thousand year old recipes carved into stone, found in the current Iraq, are under a different kind of scrutiny than Martha Stewart’s ninety-seventh book (it’s called Cake Perfection). Ancient art is not the territory of the critic, but of the historian. Perhaps a specialised one like an art or food historian, but a historian nonetheless. We, the rest of us, simply think it’s marvellous, not only because it was once created, but because it has survived.
What hasn’t survived, though, are those chunks of meat, gone is that fire pit. This making of a fire, these tools to cut, grate, grind: They qualify cooking as a form of art in the broadest sense of the word, one of human imagination and inventiveness applied to our surroundings, but they don’t necessarily point towards seeking beauty. There are multiple reasons for the preparation of food, such as making the inedible edible or the perishable preservable, and pleasure is just one of them. It’s hard to say when exactly humans began to view food as something more than mere survival necessity. One could argue that cooking was not an art form until the very moment someone realised there was creativity and freedom in the preparation of food — that it could be a form of self-expression or an expression of community. Food is an ephemeral medium, (its disappearance is the nature of the game) so in order to go back in time, we have to make do with accounts of it, reports on its importance, written by gourmands: the critics of food. From those, we learn the belief that a society’s cooking reveals its true soul has been with us for a long time. Both ancient Greek and Chinese tradition insist that the supposed ‘barbarism’ of their neighbours was evidenced by their raw or crudely cooked food. In ancient China, understanding the art of the table was equally important to the intellectual elite as knowledge of poetry or the visual arts, and in the Caliphate of Baghdad, poems about the pleasures of the table were recited and collected. This didn’t necessarily mean that the cook got much praise or appreciation. Quite the reverse, in fact: It seems that the gourmand was recognised as a beacon of civilisation long before chefs could reach celebrity status. Here lies an interesting point about culinary art: Although the opposite is increasingly true, so much in food is not about the individual that prepares it, but about tradition, social life and culture at large. And while there is innovation in food, it isn’t always appreciated in the same way artistic originality is in other art forms — let alone pushed. From a Western point of view, it might seem like this calls into question how much, or how little, in food can hold its own as an art form, as opposed to a craft or simply an aspect of cultural life. Until fairly recently, the idea of the geniuscreator, the artist, a long-existing concept in other art forms like literature or music, was non-existent in the kitchen. But that idea, although stubborn and deeply rooted, has not been with us for all that long in general.
This distinction between art and craft is a European creation of the Renaissance. Until then, all things from painting to textiles and ceramics were created in collectives, in which the old master-apprentice system ruled. The products coming out of these workshops were considered a collective achievement, and more often than not, the person who commissioned the work, rather than its creators, was remembered: Think pyramids or royal jewelry. The ideals of the Renaissance brought individual creativity more into focus, and some artists managed to convince both their commissioners and the general public to pay and appreciate them based on their personal merit. When the Italian painter Giorgio Vasari published his book The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects in 1550, the line between art and craft in Western thinking had forever been drawn. From then on, some art forms would be considered works of individual genius, whereas others — often those which remained within the old guild system — were seen as lower or decorative arts.
Before food would climb the ranks, before cooks would be revalued to chefs, it would take some three-hundred more years, and began with the emergence of the European restaurant.
We take restaurants for granted, but, like anything, the set of expectations we bring to one does emerge from somewhere. A restaurant is not just an establishment that sells prepared food — those have been around for thousands of years. (Only last year, an amazingly well-preserved take-out place was unearthed in the city of Pompeii, which had been buried under volcanic ash since 79 AD.) A restaurant, on the other hand, is a destination of its own — a restaurant gives you choice in what to eat in the form of a menu, a restaurant allows you to sit down at your own table, a restaurant has waitstaff to take your order and deliver your food. Establishments like these first appeared in China, where they have a much longer history. In Europe, they emerged — and got their name — in Paris, some 250 years ago. These first restaurants sold what was then just coming up: French cuisine as we know it today. The hype spread, and pretty soon, restaurants were popping up all over the continent, and all were loyal to their role model and all sold French food. Where many cultures had known a long history of thinking and writing about the meaning of food, in Europe this was almost non-existent until the early days of the restaurant. In 1803, Alexandre Balthasar Laurent Grimod de la Reynière published his first Almanach des Gourmands, and thus invented the restaurant review. It wasn’t just the restaurant itself that spread across the continent, but also this new text genre. In its course, it solidified the idea of French food as haute cuisine, as better and more refined and more artful than any other, giving way to the cult of and surrounding the chef. The enjoyment of food, which in Christian Europe had long been burdened by the sin of gluttony, slowly became a presentable aspect of high society, which could now be lived out in the public showroom of the restaurant.
The emergence of a popular culture, which was made possible by the advancements of technology in print and later broadcast, allowed for the fame of certain restaurants, and in turn certain chefs, to spread farther than ever. Links to other forms of art also crystallised: Dishes like the pavlova were inspired by, and named after, famous figures of the performing arts. Moreover, the professional chef also became more of a performer and, by extension, cooking a performance, as the topic of food was picked up by newspapers, radio and television. At home, the traditional cuisine that was part of a region’s social and cultural calendar remained popular, while media and the Michelin guide further canonised French haute cuisine. This created a division in food between the “high” of Paris’s chic restaurants and the “low” of a holiday meal at home — between art and craft. Haute cuisine reached its peak with the invention of molecular gastronomy. By then, fine dining had evolved to be defined by experimentation and originality, which, in the eyes of many, truly turned chefs into artists: with the plate as an empty canvas, everything was possible. Food’s inauguration into the realm of high art was completed when in 2007, Ferran Adrià, chef of now-closed Spanish restaurant El Bulli and a pioneer of molecular cuisine, was invited to take part in the legendary Documenta art fair in Kassel, Germany.
Like language, the evolution of food and its place in our societies is an interesting and highly important field of study, as it teaches us a lot about who we are. Food really is like a language in the sense that its evolution is fluid, unstoppable, always shaped by internal and external changes, and simultaneously influencing all other aspects of culture in return. Too strong a focus on tradition can be stifling and misguided — like language purists trying to halt the natural development in our communication. On the other hand, an almost compulsive trend towards innovation and change can alienate us from one of the strongest connections any of us can feel: to the comfort of food. Reflection is good, prescription not so much. The structures of the Western art world, which have increasingly been applied to food, have tried to inflict such prescription onto food, dividing into important and banal, art and survival: the realm of the critic and the realm of the anthropologist. But the truth is that all food is meaningful, if only because too many people still have too little of it, and that there is real creativity and artfulness in food born out of scarcity and oppression, which is a far cry from star-spangled restaurants and television chefs. The fine dining establishment is a museum, a place for showcasing and collecting, but if you look around, the world of food is much larger than that. Future generations, like ourselves, will have to rely on accounts of food to help understand our ancestors; when our criticism focuses only on the ‘high’, the ‘fine’ and the ‘brand-new’, we’re leaving the biggest part of the story out.
For another perspective on food and art — Tom Wolfe’s perspective — read: PAINTING WORDS, IMAGINING FOOD: FOOD AS CONCEPTUAL ART
Text: Yannic Moeken
Copy Editing: Charlotte Faltas
Photography: Junshen Wu
Concept and Styling: Junshen Wu & Yannic Moeken
Sources:
Paul Freedman A New History of Cuisine. In: Food. The History of Taste. Edited by Paul Friedman. London, 2007.
Elliott Shore: Dining Out. The Development of the Restaurant. In: Food. The History Of Taste. Edited by Paul Friedman. London, 2007.
Art Definition: https://www.lexico.com/definition/art
Sarah Schreiber: A Master List of Martha Stewart’s Books — All 97 of Them
Dr. Saul McLeod: Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
Laura Morelli: Is there a difference between art and craft?
Jessica Mason: This Unearthed Pompeii Pub Is an Amazing Look Into Ancient Roman Life
Madeline Moy: The Evolution of The Restaurant Review
Erik Eckholm: Mesopotamia: Cradle of Haute Cuisine?
