Gender and Aesthetics by Korsmeyer Carolyn;

Author:Korsmeyer, Carolyn;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 200081
Publisher: Routledge

Food in art

What about food in art? Obviously food and drink have often been the subject-matter of art, especially in still-life painting that makes them the central subjects for study. (Incidentally, there is a gender import here as well, for still-life and flower paintings—regarded by academicians as the least important form of this art—were for years considered the only genres of painting in which women could excel.)17 Often still-life painters explored the decay implicit in the physical substance of foods by featuring them in vanitas motifs—that is, pictures that remind the viewer of the insignificance of human accomplishment in the sweep of time. One could say that the very sense hierarchy is an implicit theme of such paintings, for rotting foods represent mortality and the fragility of physical life.

Literature and movies frequently feature food as well, often simply as part of the background and setting of plots, for it is a feature of eating that it needs to occur fairly frequently. This is one reason it is so easy to overlook its meanings, for often we eat only to satisfy a bodily requirement quickly. (On the other hand, if one is suffering scarcity from poverty or famine, the importance of routine fuel is hard to overlook.) But food is featured as a centerpiece of some works, such as both the stories and the movies of Babette’s Feast, Like Water for Chocolate, Chocolat, or Tampopo. As with older still-life paintings, the sense hierarchy enters into the presentation of foods in literature and film—in these cases extolling the bodily pleasures in contrast to moralism and austere asceticism, and reversing the values usually assigned the senses. Food and drink are often explored in art as a means to reflect on the body and its fleeting pleasures, but their presence as subject-matter for depiction and narrative does not affect the theoretical consideration of food and eating outside of art.

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