by Dwight Furrow
The explosion of interest in the aesthetics of food and beverages over the past several decades inevitably raises the question whether certain culinary preparations or wines can be considered works of art. I have argued elsewhere that indeed food and wine can be works of art. But within the wine and food world many winemakers and chefs prefer to think of themselves as craft persons rather than artists, and in philosophy there is substantial resistance to including food and wine in the category of a fine art. The question of how we distinguish a craft from an art is thus germane to this debate.
Unfortunately, traditional ways of drawing the distinction between craft and the fine arts are inadequate. In fact, a too sharply drawn distinction between art and craft will mischaracterize both. Nevertheless, I think there is a distinction to be made between art and craft and at least some wines and culinary preparations are best viewed as works of art.
As Larry Shiner has pointed out, both the term "fine art" and the term "craft" are relatively recent inventions. ""Craft" as the name of a category of disciplines only goes back to the late nineteenth century when it emerged partly in reaction to machine production, and partly in reaction to the fine art academies' exclusion of the "minor," "decorative," or "applied" arts." Fine art, according to Shiner, was a phrase used to market works of art to the emerging middle class marking off craftwork, works that are merely useful, from works that were "the appropriate object of refined taste."
In the past we might have used the type of material being worked on to distinguish art from craft. Paint on canvas, words on a page, notes played by instruments were candidates for works of art. The transformation of wood, clay, metals or fabric was craft. But since the birth of installations and the expansion of materials used for artistic expression, artists today work in media such as textiles, plastics, metals and wood. So the type of material will no longer suffice to mark the distinction. Why then not food or wine as candidates for artistic expression?