Ingestional Aesthetics: Deciphering Eating in Contemporary Art

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.

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.

Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio , 2017

Can there be "languages of food" in Nelson Goodman's sense of "languages of art" ? Food appears like a borderline case because of its strong dependence on context and on the individuals involved. We seem to have difficulty either comparing food with language or seeing it as art. This is at odds with the fact that food has been recognized as an art form for decades by art institutions. The paper approaches this problem on a level often neglected in the discussion: pragmatics, the application of language in context. Cognitive scientists Deirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber have shown that the use of language is ultimately based not on rules, but on relevance. Relevance in turn depends on contexts and individuals. Such dependence, therefore, does not make food a borderline case. Rather, it is something that food and language have in common. But can we use a concept of relevance to analyze food? Following the phenomenology of Alfred Schutz, relevance has two sides, termed here "typicality" and "spontaneity". Both sides of relevance are found to shape our experience of food in striking ways. Food is a particularly clear example of a more general, relevance-driven context dependence of both language and the arts.

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...

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.

An increasing attention to and interest in food, cooking and eating are hallmarks of contemporary culture. Cooking shows keep proliferating in the media, social movements focused on healthy nutrition are mushrooming and becoming ever more influential, and the culinary blogosphere and food tourism are thriving. Food and eating prove also inspiring to many contemporary artists, who not only view them as relevant subjects but also - more importantly perhaps - use food products as materials for their art. Can we food and cooking, without hesitation, call art? This question will be answered by the participants of Perspectives on Food Aesthetics conference. The special guest of the conference is prof. Richard Shusterman, who will give a keynote speech titled Somaesthetics and the Fine Art of Eating.