Applied Aesthetics - Gastronomy

Gastronomy

Although food is a basic and frequently experienced commodity, careful attention to the aesthetic possibilities of foodstuffs can turn eating into gastronomy. Chefs inspire our aesthetic enjoyment through the visual sense using colour and arrangement; they inspire our senses of taste and smell using spices, diversity/contrast, anticipation, seduction, and decoration/garnishes. In regard to drinking water, there are formal criteria for aesthetic value including odour, colour, total dissolved solids and clarity. There are numerical standards in the U.S. for aesthetic acceptability of these parameters.

Note, however, a use of a word translated to "culinary" in Adorno's aesthetics. Adorno distinguishes between technically accurate and "beautiful" musical interpretation, and an interpretation higher which brings out the "truth" in the musical text: interpretations more rehearsed, with more time for rehearsal, but which might sound strange to audiences pandered-to by popular conductors (perhaps in the way Glenn Gould enstranges the music of Beethoven).

Unfortunately for the ordinary reader of Adorno, this isn't something technical such as "original instruments". It is instead the work of art that doesn't pander to what the audience "wants"...its whims.

This is linked to a Marxist interpretation which instead of treating the audience as an all-powerful "customer" adopts a teacherly or even priestly stance "above" the mere audience, something only the most "snobbish" of French chefs would dare, proposing to teach it to like Higher Things.

There are rarefied forms of *haute* cuisine; but note that common sense usually has a horselaugh about precious Yuppies eating designer food which it withholds about concert-goers listening to Berg; your man in the street merely thinks the latter crowd to be odd jobs, and doesn't resent them, meaning that ethical judgements play a role in aesthetic judgements that specialists in ethics, and specialists in aesthetics, systematically disregard...but which artists such as Tolstoy regarded as central.

Based on Adorno's theory of the (merely) culinary as not being "art", this would seem to mean that it is a joke, for an Adornoite (if such a person exists meaningfully), to treat cooking as an art form or eating as art appreciation.

Monty Python would often reverberate with this sort of arcana in a strange way: in the Mr. Creosote passage of The Meaning of Life, an enormously fat man is persuaded by the fawning waiter to have one more sweet whereupon Mr. Creosote throws up all over the dining room. Note that the scene has more claims to be art, despite being nauseating, than designer food.

This MAY be an unconscious comment on any theory of art that blindly equates "fine dining" and a visit to the picture galleries, a sort of tourist equation in which picture galleries are overrun in fact by post-prandial Mr. Creosotes. Even the ordinary man in the street would say that the starving artist visiting the gallery has a "better" apprehension of the higher, more inner, more elusive aura of the art work than Mr. Creosote, which means that for some authors, including Adorno, there is a nexus between ethics (which nearly tracks aesthetics polyphonically, where we use "good" and "bad" in ethics to characterise people and their deeds, and in aesthetics to judge what to buy).

The possibility of a rejection of the culinary in art starts with Kant's theory of the sublime but does not end there; post Holocaust (with its Nazis playing Bach: with Adorno's questions about poetry after Auschwitz) the culinary, and whether the German officer enjoying a "fine" meal has much of anything to do with art, become important aesthetic questions.

A Marxist theory of art would probably conclude that the chef cannot be an artist, lacking autonomy and beholden to the customer, Mr. Creosote, in all regards.