Twelfth International Conference on Food Studies

Abstract

Our contemporary cultural situation invites a comparison of two recently intersecting phenomena, the increasingly high regard of aestheticized food production and the increasingly everyday quality of contemporary art practice that employs food as a medium. Traditionally, “taste” as a sensory ability was excluded from “taste” as an indication of cultural refinement. This distinction was rooted in a historical hierarchy of the senses. However, in the last two decades, and for the first time in history, the cultural products of high gastronomy (Adriá, Achatz, Blumenthal…), have been displayed in institutions usually dedicated to the “fine arts.” At the very same historical moment, contemporary artists (Rirkrit Tiravanija, Mary Ellen Carroll, Lee Mingwei…). The present essay briefly surveys the background of the tension between “taste” and “taste” by conflating John Dewey’s aesthetic theory, which included the consumption of food as aesthetic, with Clement Greenberg’s formalism, which channeled aesthetic experience into a narrowly defined opticality. Instead of either of these positions, the paper argues that Mary Rawlinson’s recent theory of the “everyday” (2017) repositions this philosophical stalemate along more productive lines of thinking. It employs her ideas, first applied as a phenomenology of food production and consumption to contemporary art that employs food activities, finding a creative common ground between seemingly different fields of cultural production.