A Sensuous Feast: Contemporary Art, Food, and the Five Senses

When the art market was hit by the current economic crisis it seemed as though the days of grandiloquent art and overindulgence in collecting were coming to an end. Alternatively, from the point of view of this show, the art world-its creators, buyers, and viewers-have an insatiable hunger to consume. The representation of foodstuffs has been a traditional subject matter in still life painting since the sixteenth century. Yet stretching even further back to the sixth century it is possible to locate gluttony as the sin of the overindulgent eater. Thus, the problem with food in art is its familiarity and its sinister implications of temptation and it has since been placed at the bottom of the hierarchy of painting genres. While all of the works in the show of course awaken our visual sense, the works shift away from the conceptual and ocular-oriented tradition of viewing art by using food as a medium to allure visitors to explore other compelling ways to digest art and to understand the potent sensory properties of foods