The Taste of Art: Food, Cooking, and Counterculture in Contemporary Practices

The Taste of Art offers a sample of scholarly essays that examine the use of food in Western contemporary art practices. The contributors are scholars from a range of disciplines, such as art history and philosophy, film studies and history. As a whole, the volume shows how artists engage with food as matter and process, in order to explore alternative aesthetic strategies and indicate countercultural shifts in society. In the first section, the reader will find papers that explore the theoretical intersections of art and food, Food art’s historical root of Futurism, and the ways in which food carries gendered meaning in popular film. The following sections analyze how artists challenge mainstream ideas through food in a variety of scenarios. Starting from a focus on the body and subjectivity, the authors zoom out to look at the domestic sphere, and finally examine the role of the public sphere. The papers included in The Taste of Art consider numerous case studies, by devoting particular attention to artists like, among others: Daniel Spoerri, Dieter Roth, Joseph Beuys, Al Ruppersberg, Alison Knowles, Martha Rosler, Paul McCarthy, Luciano Fabro, Carries Mae Weems, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Janine Antoni, Liza Lou, and Natalie Jeremijenko.