Is Food the Art World’s Next Frontier?
A first bite and a first gaze share a mutual promise of revelation. Whether on a plate or on a wall, a tempting creation taps onto multiple senses, and artists and chefs have long journeyed their creative paths with similar intrigue and ambition.
From Renaissance artist Arcimboldo’s portraits entirely made out of fruits and vegetables to Fluxus artist Alison Knowles’s The Identical Lunch performances based on her eating the same tuna sandwich every day, food has been instrumental for artists in expanding the confines of reality.
After Michael Chow quit painting and opened in London his first restaurant 56 years ago, little could he imagine that his impact on the art world through his dining behemoth would eventually make him a subject of his painter friends, Warhol, Haring, Basquiat, Hockney, Ruscha, and Schnabel. Across the pond, the 1970s Soho eatery FOOD was envisioned by a group of artists, including the neighborhood fixture Gordon Matta-Clark, and set a precedent for artist-run culinary projects with experimental eats.
Today, a space just one door down from where FOOD stood is home to the New York City outpost of Manuela, a restaurant from Hauser & Wirth’s hospitality outfit Artfarm, which will feature works by artists including Pat Stier and Lorna Simpson. In Bozeman, Montana, the artist Agnes Denes has planted an acre of wheat that doubles as a piece called “Wheatfield — An Inspiration. The seed is in the ground.” Dom Perignon recently released a special-edition 2015 vintage inspired by the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, and perhaps the most-Instagrammed room at MoMA's recent Ed Ruscha exhibition had walls covered in chocolate. More and more, the art and culinary worlds seem to be overlapping—and finding success doing so.
In London
British artist, textile designer, and illustrator John Booth’s brightly colored whimsical universe has adorned Fendi bags, Paul Smith’s windows, and even cremation urns. The icing on the East London-based artist’s rapidly growing success is turning his playful ceramics into alluring confections. Booth has designed three intricate cakes in collaboration with Rosewood London’s executive pastry chef Mark Perkins for the hotel’s Art Afternoon Tea series.
“The adage that people eat with their eyes holds true, especially in the world of desserts,” says Perkins. The saccharine feasts (for the eyes and tastebuds) at the property's glitzy Mirror Room have been made since 2017 in partnership with the likes of Yayoi Kusama, Antony Gormley, and Banksy. This year’s menu, which coincides with the Frieze London art fair week in early October, includes a piece called Tropical Tulip in celebration of the recurring floral motif in Booth’s visual vocabulary. The delicate flower sits over a tube-shaped cake with mango mousse, orange passionfruit jelly, and pistachio sponge.
The hotel’s 15th artist collaboration is first in crafting original concoctions as opposed to replicating in flour and sugar existing works of art from the Tate. For Perkins, true inspiration is, “different techniques and vibrant color palettes artists use to bring their visions to life.” The chef especially favors The Twins, a piece that celebrates Booth’s bond with his fraternal sister. In it, the artist’s favorite dessert—sticky toffee pudding with custard—is paired with a chocolate date sponge cake. The outer layer is equally split between a glazed and layered coating, crowned with a comical flower with pink and yellow sides.
Perkins’s criteria for success is simple: “When we create a piece that not only looks beautiful but also tastes exquisite—to the point where guests hesitate to cut into it—we’ve truly created art.”
In Vienna
Few hotels are as ingrained in their city as Vienna’s Hotel Sacher. A symbol of the Austrian capital’s Belle Époque past, the 148-year-old establishment still draws large crowds eager to savor its eponymous chocolate-and-apricot-jam torte. A thousand of these cakes each year come in an artist-designed wooden box (proceeds from this year's sales benefit the autism and epilepsy research organization Neurolentech); previously they've been created by the likes of Erwin Wurm, Sarah Morris, and Georg Baselitz, and this year’s selectee to wrap the decadent dessert is Robert Longo, who'll also have joint shows this fall at the London outposts of Pace and Thaddaeus Ropac as well as a survey, The Acceleration of History, at the Milwaukee Art Museum.
A black-and-white image of a tiger with watchful eyes from his Kings series (2011-2014) elevates the joy of unpacking a sweet escape. “When we opened one of the cakes for the first time, my children were already attacking it,” says Longo. "Eating like a king is, of course, a sensory experience. Not unlike experiencing an artwork."
In New York City
Like pastry chefs, mixologists master their craft through a balanced alchemy; strict measurements blend with an instinctive command over the ingredients. New York’s gastronomic stalwart Eleven Madison Park has carved a new cocktail and snack bar on the restaurant’s second floor dedicated to the Italian painter Francesco Clemente, whose mythic illustrations of modern life helped define New York’s 1980s downtown. The restaurant’s Swiss chef and owner Daniel Humm initially intended to pay homage to his artist friend with an eponymous cocktail, and he also considered adding one of Clemente's enigmatic paintings to the restaurant’s walls, where works by Rita Ackermann, Jeppe Hein, and Rashid Johnson already hang. “At some point, I realized we should have an entire bar in honor of Francesco,” says Humm.
The result is Clemente Bar, where innovative cocktails by the restaurant’s award-winning beverage director Sebastian Tollius are complimented by bites at an eight-seat counter. The chef, who turned his celebrated restaurant into a vegan operation in 2021, gave his friend the bar’s walls as a blank canvas with a single direction: “I just wanted them to be joyful,” he says. Clemente’s response is a sprawling display of hand-painted frescoes of floating lovers and lush blossoms. “Gold shines in the dark, on one side a procession of celebrants carries gifts and treasure, on the other side, a great wave washes away the complications of love,” Clemente explains.
For Humm, art has been indispensable, both in life and culinary journey. When he encountered Monet’s Water Lilies at age 10, he shed a tear: “I still don’t know if I cried because I was happy or sad.” Today, most of his friends are artists, and the restaurant which he considers his home is where he feels “as close to having people over as possible.” Clemente’s permanent mark on his new home excites the chef. “Francesco and I share a love for New York and for joy and humor,” he says. Clemente finds a familiar parallel between a visual and culinary feast: “Permanence offers comfort, good food offers comfort too—it is the comfort of familiar and pleasant sensations often surprising sensations, rather than the comfort of reason, habit, and convention.”
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