• A consortium of City of Detroit creditors have made the first legal move towards pressuring the Detroit Institute of Arts to sell city-owned artworks to help pay for debts owed. Executive Vice President Annemarie Erickson defends the museum against Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr’s demand that the museum find one way or another to contribute $500 million in assistance to the bankrupt city.
• The California Arts Council will apply a $2-million funding windfall it received from Assembly member John Perez to several new initiatives in arts education and community improvement, including Creative California Communities, The Arts in Turnaround Schools, and Jump stARTS. In the face of a 7.6% budget cut handed down last year, the state arts council is taking a gamble on the success of these programs winning fresh credibility with policymakers and an increase in annual funding.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Jamie Bennett, chief of staff and director of public affairs at the NEA, will take over as executive director of the creative placemaking funder collaboration ArtPlace America starting in January. He succeeds ArtPlace’s founding director Carol Coletta, who joined the Knight Foundation back in March, and interim head Jeremy Nowak.
• After a decade serving Californians as president of the James Irvine Foundation, James E. Canales will step down in the spring to become the first president of another arts funder, Boston’s Barr Foundation.

• There has been some shuffling in the world of state and local arts councils. Ohio Arts Council ED Julie Henahan has retired after thirty years; Milton Rhodes, President of the Arts Council of Winston-Salem and Forsyth County in North Carolina, has retired and been succeeded by Jim Sparrow; and Glenda Toups was dismissed from her position as ED of the Houma Regional Arts Council in Louisiana in the wake of the discovery by the board that the Council was not in compliance with state reporting law.

• We’ve known for a while that Michael Kaiser is leaving his post as President of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts; now it turns out he’s taking the DeVos Institute of Arts Management with him. Both are moving to the University of Maryland, where Kaiser will be a professor of practice beginning in the fall, and hopes to expand the Institute to include a master’s program.
• Financial news giant Bloomberg has decided to discontinue its cultural journalism brand, Muse, in favor of focusing more on leisure and luxury. Along with the reassignment of Muse editor Manuela Hoelterhoff and a cadre of employees and contracted writers, the news outlet laid off theater critic Jeremy Gerard.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• The Hewlett Foundation has announced a rigorous new “Openness and Transparency” policy, which assumes from the outset that information the foundation creates should be made public to improve outcomes, spark debate, and foster collaboration. Hewlett’s President Larry Kramer offers context in a post on the foundation’s new blog; transparency watchdogs celebrate the policy.
• The D5 Coalition has released a scan of best practices and a guide to online resources for foundations wishing to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion at every stage of their work.

IN THE FIELD

• Eric Booth and Tricia Tunstall share profiles of El Sistema “encounters” in five of approximately 55 countries – Sweden, Austria, Korea, Japan, and Canada – that have borrowed from Venezuela’s seminal movement to realize youth development goals through “intensive investment in ensemble music.” The global umbrella for El Sistema has also released the first literature review of “research, evaluation, and critical debates” related to Sistema-inspired programs around the world.
• The Arts Council of Lawrence, New Jersey has shut down after 42 years, having, in the words of one member, “outlived [its] usefulness.” Originally formed by a group of female volunteers, the Council struggled to recruit younger members throughout the recession.
• The August Wilson Center for African American Culture in Pittsburgh is struggling mightily. After a struggle to find an audience and keep backers the organization has been forced to move further and further from its original intention to create a cultural home for the people portrayed in Wilson’s plays, working class African Americans. A conservator has been appointed to try to avoid liquidation.
• The Warehouse, an all-ages music venue in La Crosse, Wisconsin, has filed to become a nonprofit after 22 years as a for-profit, prompting some musicians to wax lyrical about their time there. Financial pressures were the primary impetus, but owner Steve Harm has indicated he will open the space to the local community in new ways to provide a public good.
• Fractured Atlas has added another tool to their encouraging-and-rewarding-arts-entrepreneurship tool belt. The Arts Entrepreneurs Awards will recognize artists and arts organizations who have “innovated new business practices or paradigms” or  “developed novel solutions to old problems.” Nominations will be accepted until December 22nd at 5:59pm.

BIG IDEAS

• A report from the Next Generation Evaluation Conference forecasts “game-changing” trends in impact evaluation, including shorter evaluation cycles and simpler measurement systems.
• “Is social practice gentrifying community arts out?” Arlene Goldbard parses the difference between the art world’s latest obsession and community cultural engagement.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Southern Methodist University’s National Center for Arts Research is about to release its inaugural report, drawing on what it calls the “most comprehensive set of data ever compiled” on arts organizations.  In addition to a statistical overview of the field – did you know that performance of an arts organization is lower in communities with a higher concentration of graduate degrees? – the report attempts to answer the question, “What makes one arts organization more successful than another?” The key turns out to be leadership.
• Speaking of data aggregation, Markets for Good has a progress report on the BRIDGE (Basic Registry of Identified Global Entities) project, an ambitious collaborative effort to identify and map philanthropic entities across the world.
• A new report by the Consumer Federation of America bashes “abuse of market power by a highly concentrated music sector,” argues against the need “to expand copyright holders’ rights,” and suggests that digital file-sharing (aka “piracy”) may, in some cases, actually be good for both artists and consumers. One well-circulated chart suggests that it is the proceeds of live performance, not recordings, that drives artists’ income.
• Gold standard at Crystal Bridges? In a rare, randomized, controlled (albeit “natural”) experiment on the effects of art on students, a single school-group visit to the major new museum appears to have raised students’ scores on vague but desirable traits such as critical thinking, social tolerance, historical empathy, and likelihood of future museum visits. It’s too soon to parse out the effect of contemporary art in particular.
• A study of STEM graduates from the Michigan State University’s Honors College found that graduates who went on to earn patents or start companies had more arts and crafts experiences than the average Americans – and believed their ability to innovate was influenced by that experience. (The paper itself is behind a paywall.)
• How “rampant” is gentrification? New research suggests that most urban areas experienced only “moderate” gentrification in the past decade, with significant variations across cities. Unsurprisingly, gentrification was most prevalent in large and dense metro regions with solid public transit infrastructure.

In recent years participatory culture has subverted consumerist habits, mass media production, and even our social interactions. People who wouldn’t previously have considered themselves creative are getting opportunities to become true collaborators in producing what they consume in fields where once they could only serve as audience members. Nowhere is this more true, arguably, than in the San Francisco Bay Area, the birthplace of parklets, Twitter, and Yelp. It’s clear that the lines between producer and consumer are being blurred in arts administration and education as well. Organizations of vastly differing sizes are adjusting to our changing culture in their own ways, altering how they interact with the public and how the public interacts with them.

Viewed from the outside, the two organizations I work for could not be more dissimilar, and yet both find themselves enveloped in this trend. Adobe Books and Arts Cooperative, where I head the gallery and serve on the board of directors, is a small, community-run bookstore and art gallery open since 1989; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), meanwhile, where I work in the education department, is a large, international collecting institution of modern and contemporary art. Both are at crucial points in their history, and progressing in divergent directions in their vision for public participation and assessment of their educational goals. SFMOMA is reaching to be more experimental, more integrated into daily life, and more collaborative, while Adobe Books is realizing that it must become more like a museum in many ways (more organized, more curated, with a developed mission statement) in order to stay afloat. These organizations are evolving slowly towards each other, providing us with a unique window into how cultural institutions are balancing educational priorities with dueling needs for top-down curation and creative collaboration.

Both Adobe Books and SFMOMA are known as culture makers, information disseminators, and artistic/cultural venues in San Francisco. And both, in the past year, have left their longtime homes. SFMOMA has decided to infiltrate the city and beyond with creative programming and artist projects, “on the go” until 2016 while the museum is closed for an expansion, and Adobe Books was pushed out of its longtime home on 16^th Street due to rising rents and gentrification, recently relocating to a cozier space on 24^th Street. The similarities end there. SFMOMA has over 200 employees, and has the resources to maintain a strong presence in the city, with or without an actual building. Adobe Books, by contrast, could not survive without a store; it is known locally as “the living room of the Mission,” and providing a space for people to meet and for the public to gather is a crucial part of who we are. Though Adobe Books’s art gallery is now fiscally sponsored through Intersection for the Arts, the bookstore portion is still just that, a store, with goods to sell.

Adobe Books at its new location on 24th St. Photo by Tiffany Seinz.

The Story of the Community Bookstore

Clay Shirky argues in his book Here Comes Everybody that organizing without organizations is the modus operandi of the 21st century, writing that “unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.” Adobe Books, though a sole proprietorship for nearly 25 years, has seemingly always operated on a community-run, collaborative model. By stepping back from curation and allowing community members to give life to the space, former owner Andrew McKinley was able to establish Adobe Books as a safe harbor for ideas, a place for meeting and doing, and a spot of artistic intervention for many.

Adobe Books is a natural spot for self-directed learning. Despite a more tightly curated selection of books in our new, smaller spot on 24^th Street, as a mostly-used bookstore with an ever-fluctuating inventory, most customers come in with the expectation of finding something they didn’t yet know they wanted. Because the programming is mostly developed by the visiting public, free programs happen easily and often. Only just recently has the Board of Directors created an online events calendar, or a website at all for that matter. Yet, as Shirky might have predicted, this lack of organization did not deter people from coming into the space; if anything, it fueled widespread neighborhood involvement. People came to the Adobe space on 16^th Street for the books, the people, and the likely chance that something was going on: an art opening, music performance, poetry reading, etc. This scarcity of management also gave the makers and doers of the community a sense of comfortable ownership over a space where they could speak their peace, make their mark, host a party, or even take a nap.

In 2013, however, with a rapidly gentrifying Mission District and steeply rising rents throughout San Francisco, time was running out for a bookstore that operated more like a community center than a for-profit business. Transitioning into a cooperative business with a fiscally sponsored gallery seemed to be the only option for survival. With significant seed funding from a successful Indiegogo campaign, Adobe Books has financially found a new lease on life. At the same time, as a cooperative with a managing board of directors, we struggle with how much to curate the space rather than let the community dictate our programming.

The new 24^th Street incarnation of Adobe Books is a bit more reserved than before. With 14 directors full of their own artistic ideals, the pressure of fulfilling the promises of a successful crowdfunding campaign, and the gallery’s new fiscally-sponsored status, we feel the responsibility to be organized and thoughtful about our decisions. As an administrator by trade, I must admit I garner some pleasure from drawing up loan agreements, event MOUs, and vendor contracts. I like that we maintain a calendar, and that price negotiations on all book sales is no longer the norm. As I happily file reimbursement forms, I do wonder if all of this “organization” is slowly killing the community space that Adobe Books used to be.

Artists in the Adobe Books gallery often give me sideways glances when I hand them a loan agreement—the sort of formality that has never been instituted before. More and more inquiries about book readings, concerts, and other events are being directed to a single events manager, which is just as convenient for us as it is inconvenient for the person inquiring at the front desk who has to remember to scribble down the correct email address. Adobe is learning to be more top-down, and all the while asking ourselves if this structure is worth the exclusion that often comes with this sort of organizational map.

SFMOMA takes programs “on the go” with Mark di Suvero’s sculptures on Crissy Field. Photo by Dominic Santos.

A Museum On the Go

In contrast, SFMOMA is ever so slightly turning bottom-up, and learning that providing arts experiences with a listening ear can be more relevant and valuable to today’s population than white walls with a system for dispersing information about objects.

At SFMOMA, even the education department has a directive to curate its offerings for the public in a more or less top-down way. As with any museum, we have both the task of engaging the public as well as protecting a historical archive. However, SFMOMA is unusual in our commitment to becoming part of urban life for the residents and visitors of San Francisco. In the 2.5 years of its closure, the museum has committed to activating the city in exciting ways, perhaps echoing the recent rise of socially engaged art. Projects like Project Los Altos in the town of the same name and our decentralized exhibition of the 2012 Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art (SECA) awards insert art into everyday life. David Wilson’s SECA piece literally directs viewers to follow itineraries through San Francisco to find secret art interventions, with all journeys commencing from the closed museum doors. While some SFMOMA departments may see the temporary displacement as a hindrance, asking questions like “how will we keep membership numbers up with no museum admission?”, the education department frames it as an opportunity to do what we’ve always wanted to do, reaching out into neighborhoods, schools, and communities to participate in art projects and programs that reflect the dynamics of our city.

Rather than taking a soapbox approach to its educational programs, SFMOMA is developing two-way partnerships with schools and creating new public programs that rely heavily on audience participation. This year we are piloting several school projects that are part artist commission, part school curriculum, and part student-driven learning. These efforts are still in their infancy, but show promise in that both parties seem willing and excited to collaborate to bring contemporary art to the classroom in dynamic new ways. Our public educational programs are evolving as well. As part of our Project Los Altos exhibit, the Education Department is asking artists who participated in the exhibition to create a series of participatory art instructions to be printed in the Los Altos Town Crier, the local newspaper. Responses and documentation from those who choose to participate will be documented on the web as well as a few printed in the following week’s paper. After decades of hearing the likes of Paulo Freire and Sir Ken Robinson tell us that creativity and two-way communication between the educator and student are essential for dynamic learning, educators and education administrators are finally translating these ideals into actual teaching practices. We’re seeing the rise of Visual Thinking Strategies and other inquiry-based learning methods, evidence of the impact of participatory trends in our culture on museum education. The fact that education as a discipline has been at the vanguard of this shift means that museum educators are freer to adapt more quickly.

“You Do Have to Relinquish Some Control”

Forging new community partnerships is crucial to the health of  SFMOMA while it is without a building. Whether this comes as a welcome change or not, our 2.5-year closure may be exactly the catalyst necessary to transform SFMOMA into a leading 21^st=century institution, one thoroughly and intentionally engaged in its community. On the other hand, newly burdened by rising rent and the bureaucracy of organizing a cooperative (by-laws, articles of incorporation, etc.), Adobe Books is pushing hard to be structured while still maintaining its grassroots spirit. Both of these organizations have been molded by San Francisco’s unique, evolving culture, and transformed in recent months by both strong community support for the arts as well as by the money and change that comes with the city’s most recent tech boom.

This climate seems to have pushed San Francisco organizations to experiment with new methods of community collaboration, to search for the perfect balance between curatorial control and open source content. To stay relevant in today’s San Francisco, I suspect that more organizations will be striving for this middle ground—less “institutional” than the stuffy collecting museums of yore, yet more bureaucratic than the scrappy organizations that were once able to maintain cheap spaces in the city. As J.S. May, Chief Advancement Officer of the Portland Art Museum, recently said at the National Innovation Summit for Arts + Culture, “You do have to relinquish some control.” Just how much control to withdraw remains a pertinent and ongoing question for each individual institution – and as San Francisco’s experience demonstrates, large and small organizations have much to learn from each other across the resource divide.

With a no-nonsense approach to her writing and a suitable fearlessness of going out on a limb, Talia Gibas shook down topics in arts education and beyond in search of insight close to home.

• Science Doesn’t Have All the Answers. Should We Be Worried? Maybe a little, Talia argues, as she explores several threads of controversy within the scientific community and how they potentially relate to the challenges we face in arts research.
• In Unpacking Shared Delivery of Arts Education, Talia presents a straightforward yet in-depth explanation of this complex concept that’s currently in vogue in arts education circles. The article has already made its way into workshop curricula, and is well along the path toward becoming one of Createquity’s most popular posts of all time.
• In Arts Policy Library: Fusing Arts, Culture and Social Change, Talia takes on perhaps the most widely-read and influential arts research report of the past several years, and finds a good deal to quibble with. Read the condensed version to get a quick preview.
• If you really want to see Talia at her best, though, you simply must read Looking Beyond Our Borders for National Arts Education Policies. It’s no picnic at over 6,000 words, but the original research that went into this piece and the sheer breadth and ambition of its coverage place the article among the finest that Createquity has ever published, in my opinion.

Jacquelyn Strycker focused her time with Createquity on exploring the boundaries of what art can be and the interactions between institution and individual.

• Jacquie wrote Artificial Intelligence and the Arts as part of her application for the Writing Fellowship. Noting a number of recent advances in technology that enable the modeling/mimicking of creativity through computation, the article asks whether machines could ever replace the creative function of human beings.
• The sublime and ridiculous are considered alike in The Art School as Artwork, an image-rich look at a new breed of experimental arts education.
• From Palate to Palette: Can Food Be Art? explores the age-old (but newly relevant) question of whether the “arts” belong in “culinary arts.” The post is currently burning up social media and was picked up in ArtsJournal and Big Think, among others.
• In From Grassroots to Institution, Growing With Integrity, Jacquie examines the case of FIGMENT, a community-oriented public art festival in multiple cities, and contemplates what it might learn from past examples of small organizations that became big.
• Finally, Jacquie’s Arts Policy Library: Strategic National Arts Alumni Project analysis takes a tough look at an ambitious attempt to understand the lives and livelihoods of arts training program graduates. The short version gives a roadmap for the time-impaired.

Cheers to Jacquie and Talia for their hard work, and we can’t wait to see what the spring 2013 edition brings!

Can food be art?
Image courtesy of Jacquelyn Strycker

Last night, I cooked broccoli rabe with caramelized onions and vegan fennel sausage, along with a creamy parmesan polenta and a crusty whole wheat rosemary bread made from the Camaldoli sourdough culture that I feed flour to each day. Like many artists I know, I love to cook. My bookshelves are filled with equal numbers of art books and cookbooks. I often spend between one and two hours making dinner each night. I used to feel guilty about this—worried that my time would be better spent in my studio drawing or printing or otherwise artmaking—but then I came to see that making food—combining textures, flavors, scents and colors—is also creative. Indeed, I know many artists who are also passionate about food, and have come to consider food a part of their practices. A recent New York Times opinion piece even claims that food “has replaced art as high culture.” Yet the same article argues that food is not art.

Proust on the madeleine is art; the madeleine itself is not art.

A good risotto is a fine thing, but it isn’t going to give you insight into other people, allow you to see the world in a new way, or force you to take an inventory of your soul.

Is this true, or do chefs deserve a place at the table with painters, sculptors, photographers, musicians and performers? Can food be art?

In fact, there’s a long tradition of food as artistic medium. A paper by Howard Coutts and Ivam Day published by the Henry Moore Foundation describes the European sugar sculpture, porcelain and table layouts from the 16^th through 19^th centuries. Dining was not just about eating food, but also about its elaborate display. Tables were adorned with sculptures made from marzipan, wax or sugar paste. Court artists and designers “of the highest caliber” were the creators of these edible works. Coutts and Day describe an 1815 feast given in the Great Hall of the Louvre by the Royal Guard to celebrate the final defeat of Napoleon:

Huge pièces montées, in the form of gilded sugar military trophies, crafted by the patissier Carême, were displayed between the tables. At this level, table decorations were an aspect of political and social prestige, and required the skills of the finest artists and craftsmen of the time.

More recently, we can look at German artist Wolfgang Laib’s milkstones and rice pieces. Laib’s milkstones are large square slabs of marble that have been hollowed out and filled with milk, resulting in reflective white squares. His “Unlimited Ocean” was a grid of 30,000 piles of rice installed at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Laib uses these natural materials to create ephemeral and sensual experiences.

Leah Foster’s “Muffin Tops”
Image courtesy of the artist

Similarly, we can also look at the work of emerging artist Leah Foster, who has created elaborate installations using cupcakes. For Muffin Tops, she used thousands of cupcakes and glazed surfaces of the gallery with batter and frosting.

But food as medium is not the same as declaring that a meal is art. We get closer to this with relational aesthetics and social practice, which often use food to facilitate social interaction and community. Last year, Rirkrit Tiravanija replicated his installation, Untitled (Free/ Still) at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Museum goers were able to enter a gallery and receive a bowl of vegetarian thai curry over rice, take some water from a stocked refrigerator and then sit at one of several communal tables. The work was originally installed at 303 gallery over 20 years ago. The artist describes the original installation in a conversation with MoMA’s Director, Glenn Lowry.

So when you first walk in, what you see is kind of haphazard storage space. But as you approached this you could start to smell the jasmine rice. That kind of draws you through to the office space. And in this place I made two pots of curries, green curries. One was made how Thai restaurants in New York were making it. To counter that, on the other pot was a authentically made Thai curry. I was working on the idea of food, but in a kind of anthropological and archeological way. It was a lot about the layers of taste and otherness.

A Fallen Fruit Collective “public fruit jam”
Photo credit: Julian Bleeker

Fallen Fruit Collective is another example of participatory art involving food. David Burns, Matias Viegner and Austin Young use fruit as a material to explore notions of “urban space, ideas of neighborhood and new forms of located citizenship and community.” One of their most popular projects are their “public fruit jams” in which they invite members of the community to bring fruit and collaborate with one another to make jams. The collective explains:

Working without recipes, we ask people to sit with others they do not already know and negotiate what kind of jam to make: if I have lemons and you have figs, we’d make lemon fig jam (with lavender). Each jam is a social experiment. Usually held in a gallery or museum, this event forefronts the social and public nature of Fallen Fruit’s work, and we consider it a collaboration with the public as well as each other.

But ultimately the aforementioned projects are art first and food second. We don’t really care how Tiravanija’s curry or Fallen Fruit Collective’s jams taste; food is the means to creating a social work. Rather than art made from food (food as medium), or art that uses food to create an experience (food as impetus), is there art that is food that is art?

Future Farmers Victory Garden Seeds
Photo Credit: Mark Simpkins

We start to get there if we look at small-scale food production. Community gardens are now often viewed as both organic, local food sources and art projects. Victory Gardens 2007+ is a project developed by Garden for the Environment and the City of San Francisco’s Department for the Environment with “lead artist” Amy Franceschini. Both an art project and a model/ support system for urban gardening, they’ve received funding from art institutions like SFMOMA and the Fleishhacker Foundation. The project aims to create a network of “urban farmers” who utilize rooftops, window boxes, backyards and unused plots of land for food production. It includes the development and distribution of seed starter kits to home gardeners, food-production educational initiatives and the development of a city seed bank. The success of the gardens and seed bank are integral to the success of the project, making it equally about art and food production.

If food production can be art, why don’t we also consider the cooking of food as art? Combining and transforming materials is a fundamentally creative activity, whether those materials are paints, clays, musical notes or edible ingredients. In fact, gastronomy is even included in some countries’ ministries of cultural affairs. The embassy of Peru’s Public Diplomacy department lists “gastronomy, including the promotion of the Peruvian national drink, Pisco,” in the six types of cultural programming that the embassy supports, alongside visual arts exhibitions, cinema and music. Last year, Spain’s Ministry of Culture partnered with Casa Asia, the Cervantes Institute and the Spanish Embassy New Delhi to promote Spanish “culture industries” in India. The programming included a lecture from José Luis Galiana of Basque Culinary Center, the first university-level education centre in Gastronomic Sciences in Europe. And, in 2010, The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) honored the “gastronomic meal of the French” as part of the “intangible cultural heritage of humanity.”

If cuisine can be recognized as culture, then why aren’t we also acknowledging it as art? At street fairs in Brooklyn and on etsy.com, handcrafted, small batch artisanal foods like habanero ketchup, black garlic mayo, buffalo jerky and sea salt chocolate caramels are sold alongside knit scarves, hand sewn quilts, embroidered tea towels and beaded jewelry. The most recent Renegade Craft Fair— a juried marketplace of handmade goods– had vendors selling items like letterpress stationary, molded soaps, screenprinted t-shirts, ceramics and carved wood furniture, as well as local honey, cookies, spices and bonbons, and offerings from Chickpea & Olive and La Crêpe C’est Si Bon. The DIY movement has embraced food as craft.

The design community has also begun welcoming cuisine into the fold. Core77 Design Awards includes a category for “Food Design.” The Vitra Design Museum Boisbuchet in France has hosted a lecture by food photographer, designer and cookbook author Emilie Baltz. And in 2011, I attended Talk to Me: A Symposium at MoMA, a program that featured presentations and panel discussions related to the Architecture and Design’s concurrent exhibition, Talk to Me: Design and Communication between People and Objects. Marcus Samuelsson, the acclaimed Ethiopian-born and Swedish-raised chef and owner of Red Rooster Harlem was one of the panelists. Samuelsson passed out spiced nuts to rapt audience members, and spoke about how he designed the menu at his restaurant so that it would reflect the diversity of the Harlem community in which it’s located: dishes include soul food and Dominican cuisine with nods to Samuelsson’s own Swedish heritage, all using foods from local farmers and artisans. He was both chef and designer.

An edible menu from Moto
Photo credit: Seth Anderson

We can also look at molecular gastronomy as a point of intersection between design and food. Also referred to as modernist cuisine, it involves the application of scientific principles to cooking in order to create surprising and inventive aesthetics and textures in food. At Moto, a Chicago restaurant that specializes in this type of cooking, diners may be served a deconstructed/ reconstructed avocado, be asked to put on a smoked glove to eat a chocolate dish, and finish their meal with a printed elderflower-marshmallow menu. The restaurant’s kitchen includes a lab where chefs conduct technological experiments to create innovative dishes with flavors that often seem incongruous to their appearance, disrupting diners’ notions of what food can be.

The art world is beginning to notice. In October, Suzanne Anker, Chair of the BFA Fine Arts department at the School of Visual Arts, organized a conference called “Molecular Cuisine: The Politics of Taste” that investigated “the importance of taste from the perspectives of the culinary arts, sociology, art history and theory, anthropology, as well as the cognitive, material and biological sciences.” Anker’s projects at SVA include overseeing the creation of a Nature and Technology Lab, where, among other things, students can experiment with alternative growing systems like aquaponics, and a molecular gastronomy kit that gives them the tools to create items like olive oil foam, balsamic vinegar caviar and strawberry spaghetti.

The Edible Schoolyard at MLK Middle School in Berkeley
Photo credit: mental.masala

But it shouldn’t just be novel high-tech cooking techniques that warrant our attention. The art world needs to include chefs like Marcus Samuelsson, Alice Waters, David Chang and Christian Puglisi in its conversation as well. Waters’s restaurant, Chez Panisse, opened over four decades ago with seasonal menus created from organic, locally-sourced ingredients, serving as a model and inspiration for the locavore and slow food movements. Her Edible Schoolyard Project, begun in 1996, integrates gardening, cooking and sharing school lunch into the academic curriculums of participating institutions. Chang’s Momofuku empire serves food that combines techniques from and pays homage to wildly varying fare including Asian street food, French cuisine and McDonald’s. Puglisi’s Relea is committed to providing creative, organic, environmentally responsible meals while simultaneously eliminating the exclusivity associated with fine dining. These chefs aren’t just cooking inventive and delicious cuisine. They are also using food to tell stories, conjure memories, and to establish philosophies, such as a connection between cooking, community and sustainability.

The arts, including painting, sculpture, installation, dance and music, are in part about creating a sensory experience—something for the audience to see, feel or hear. And perhaps more than any other discipline, food has the ability to appeal to all of our senses—a combination of colors, textures, crunches, smells and tastes goes into the making of a meal, and the selection and transformation of those elements is creative. When a creative, sensory form also has the capacity to express philosophies, inspire multiple interpretations, conjure narratives and/or allude to complex meanings, it is art, whether the medium is paint or piano or polenta. Food has not replaced art as high culture; it is art.