tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6488714790941598616.post8044230626066714509..comments2023-10-01T15:20:02.434+01:00Comments on Cultural Studies @ Nottingham Trent: Gastronomy, TV and 'Culinary Texts of Indirection' ICentre for the Study of Inequality, Culture and Difference (Nottingham Trent University)http://www.blogger.com/profile/10774422840010545749noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6488714790941598616.post-10763717123201624032009-08-09T18:03:30.742+01:002009-08-09T18:03:30.742+01:00Dear Joanne and Steve,
I'd hesitate to make th...Dear Joanne and Steve,<br />I'd hesitate to make the comparison with Duchamp you've been using, after Bourdieu. You seem to be thinking in terms of Duchamp's alleged transformation of isolated found objects into "works of art" through his self-theorizing as an artist. This is not as obvious as it seems, although it has given rise to a lot of theorizing by, well, theorists. Duchamp actually transformed the objects' meaning(s) and function(s) through their set of relationships between themselves, AND between themselves and their titles, as, most notoriously, is the case with "Fountain" (which attains its ironic aura, not because Duchamp chooses to call it art, but primarly because he chooses to call it a fountain). Obviously, there is here a questioning on why this is art, but mostly on why we should care whether it is art in the first place, given that the objects retain an unsettling quality foreign to their institutional artistic aura, such as it is. <br />Now, not knowing the TV show you're referring to (yes, I've been away too long), it seems to me that there is a difference between "inventing" and "improving on" tradition. The process you've been describing is not a Fordian "print the legend" routine, but rather the culturally inherent paradox of "progressivism", whereby tradition is at once celebrated as a precondition and openly transgressed precisely for being a precondition (the chef does not hide his present intervention). The chef-artist's role is thus a traditional one, albeit with specific historical roots: a function acknowledged and perpetually, indeed inevitably, "improved on". The reinvention of the past is essential to its overcoming, albeit not by any sort of radical questioning; rather, as a process that the self-appointed artist/master (chef) has undertaken, combining (in yet another unsolvable paradox) personal creativity with historical "inevitability". I fail to see how any of this reinvents the function of cooking in a manner comparable to Duchamp's: the meals are apparently (re-)invented as food, albeit "better" than the originals (better as food AND art, obviously); so the prime contradiction of cooking ("high," patently elitist art subjected to use in the interests of a basic, universal need) is not by any means challenged; rather, we are left with the same underlying set of paradoxes, which Duchamp's intervention questions or even transgresses. Indeed, what is most shocking in Fountain is precisely the utilitarian function of the object, which persists in its decontextualization-via-renaming. I don't see any of that in your descriptions, which insist on "refinements", hence on a progressivist logic including all the aforementioned paradoxes but not doing anything significantly novel with them.Nick Stabakisnoreply@blogger.com