Program: Perspectives on Food Aesthetics

BRILL, 2023

When does eating become art? The Aesthetics of Taste answers this question by exploring the position of taste in contemporary culture and the manner in which taste meanders its way into the realm of art. The argument identifies aesthetic values not only in artistic practices, where they are naturally expected, but also in the spaces of everydayness that seem far removed from the domain of fine arts. As such, it seeks to grasp what artists – who offer aesthetic as well as culinary experiences – actually try to communicate, while also pondering whether a cook can be an artist

This chapter will focus on exploring food as a medium for art (rather than a subject) and will examine the role of chefs at the intersection of food and art, within the larger narrative of food as a creative medium. Beginning in the 1930s, it explores the role of food as a medium in certain avant-garde movements and proceeds to look at their influence on later work in the studio and the kitchen.

Encyclopedia of Food and Society, 2024

Abstract: Aesthetics as a philosophical concept excluded food in its high Western construction in the 18th century. This article shows how that was a provincial European construction that is fast losing its raison d'etre in an increasingly globalizing conceptual world that puts European elite culture in its place. I illustrate that process by showing how spices lost value in that universe of modern Eurocentric judgment and is returning to haunt haute cuisine in the North Atlantic world.

The Monist, 2018

According to the ‘Consumption Exclusion Thesis’ defended by Hegel, the fact that food is consumed means that it cannot be considered a proper art object: art is supposed to be timeless and lasting, two characteristics that food lacks by definition. According to the ‘Interest Exclusion Thesis’ defended by Kant, when judging a work of art we should not have any kind of interest towards it, because aesthetic appreciation is characterized by disinterested pleasure. In order to defend the idea that culinary objects can be art objects we will challenge both theses by proposing a definition of art able to explain how culinary objects do last in time even after their consumption, and how our approach to them can be disinterested even if we are physiologically attracted by the food. Art and food matter for different reasons. Typically, we associate art with beauty, emotions, and creativity, while food is considered our principal means of sustenance (it is our fuel, providing energy to make o...

Crítica (México D. F. En línea), 2021

Food has savour: a collection of properties (including appearance, aroma, mouth-feel) connected with the pleasure (or displeasure) of eating. This paper argues that savour is aesthetically evaluable —it is not merely “agreeable”. Further, like paradigm examples of art, savour can be assessed by how it references, or “exemplifies”, cultural norms. This paper is part of a larger project in which I develop an account of the pleasure of art. It is a virtue of my approach that it permits a much greater diversity of artforms than traditional philosophical aesthetics is inclined to allow. This includes food.

This investigation of a point of connection between aesthetics and ethics unfolds in the context of a larger project on food, philosophy, and a reinterpretation of the relationship between the two. More specifically, my goal is to take food as a starting point for rethinking some of the basic categories of philosophy, with the understanding that the rather humble position afforded to the proximal (i.e., lower) senses by the tradition—and here I am thinking primarily of taste, but also of touch and smell (both of which, incidentally, are a major component of taste and tasting as a means of encountering the world)—constitutes a site whereupon we might begin to think seriously about why food matters, and for this discussion, how the event of eating as an aesthetic experience—food as art—might lead us not only to rethink an ethics of food, but also to rethink the very foundations of ethics more broadly construed. The impetus for this project has three rather distinct origins. The first is a prompt I employed while teaching my " Food and Philosophy " course: Monty Python's skit " Art Gallery " (watch it), which features the actual ingestion of works of art. 1 The second is my involvement in the planning of a recent exhibit " A Feast for the Eyes " at the Suzanne H. Arnold Gallery on the campus of Lebanon Valley College, which featured artist's renderings of food from traditional still life paintings to Warhol and Dali. The third, which provides the theoretical backdrop for this essay, is the recent work of Jacques Rancière on aesthetics and politics. My reflection on the aesthetics of eating thus places these origins within the horizon of what might be described as a general proliferation and even democratization of gastronomic experiences since the early nineteenth century. Such phenomena include, but are not limited to, the industrialization and mechanization of methods of food production from the farm all the way to the table, the acceptance of gastronomic taste as a metaphor for judgments of subjective taste in the arts and beyond (Korsmeyer 103-115), the rise of restaurant culture as a pleasurable and accessible possibility for the middle and working classes (Sweeney), the globalization of food economies and tastes, and more recently, the explosion and ubiquity of fast food, the rise of the chef as a cultural figure and icon, and the dissemination of food culture and knowledge through television programming dedicated to food. Such democratization, however, cuts both ways, and through my investigation I hope to expose the degree to which a particular distribution of sensible

2021

The philosophy of food is an emerging and distinctive area of philosophical inquiry, and much of the work in this area has been informed by philosophical aesthetics. In recent years, philosophers have found it especially productive to explore connections between aesthetics and the sciences and philosophy of the mind. This special issue of Crítica, Revista Hispanoamericana de Filosofía aims to bring together these two developments to explore what can be learned about food by approaching it from philosophical perspectives that are richly informed by our best aesthetic theories and our best theories of the mind. In this introduction, we contextualize the recent development of the philosophy of food as an autonomous subdiscipline within philosophy and situate the essays in the special issue in relation to that subdiscipline.

International Journal of Hospitality Management, 2001

The culture of a society is manifest in a variety of ways, in its art, language and literature, music, and in all forms of religious and secular ritual. Cultural expression, however, whilst being a powerful factor in the definition and development of the human species, is not always vital in the utilitarian sense. Rather, it can be regarded as a group of activities usually referred to as ''art for living'', which provides substance, meaning, continuity and value to living in a particular social grouping. This paper argues that gastronomy, the selection, preparation, presentation and participation with culinary and gastronomic aspects of food, falls squarely into this category of 'fine art activity' since most societies seek to differentiate their food preparation into either the purely utilitarian or the highly developed and stylised methods of presentation and participation which, in many instances, are not designed for consumption merely, but also for status, ritualistic and aesthetic purposes. #