Eighteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

While there is general agreement that food itself can be beautiful, countless still-life painters would agree, depicting the act of eating, actually placing food in one’s mouth, is seemingly taboo. The environment created around consumption – dining rooms, lines, china, flowers- is often consciously intended to provide a pleasing aesthetic experience. Artists, from Roman frescoes painters to contemporary photographers, create images of feasts with hundreds of diners to solitary subjects enjoying a cup of tea and a biscuit, but rarely do they show food or drink touching lips. Of the countless paintings of the Last Supper, the food remains on the table. Of the few examples that do depict food-in-mouth, Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son, for example, or the ubiquitous photos in wedding albums of brides and grooms smashing wedding cake into each other’s mouths, the images are seemingly intended to be particularly ugly or humorous in a distasteful way. This paper explores theories that include the implicit sexuality of eating, the distortion of the face while eating, eating as a metaphor for gluttony, and the simple practicality of the difficulty of an artist’s model maintaining a chewing position. If art is a reflection of society, what drives the universal impulse to hide this very human function?