In philosophical debates about the aesthetic potential of cuisine, one central topic has been the degree to which smell and taste give us rich and structured information about the nature of reality. Aesthetic appreciation involves reflection on the meaning and significance of an aesthetic object such as a painting or musical work. Part of that appreciation is the apprehension of the work’s form or structure—it is often the form of the object that we find beautiful or otherwise compelling. Although we get pleasure from consuming good food and drink, if smell and taste give us no structured representation of reality there is no form to apprehend or meaning to analyze, so the argument goes. The enjoyment of cuisine then would be akin to that of basking in the sun. It is pleasant to be sure but there is nothing to apprehend or analyze beyond an immediate sensation.
Those who are skeptical of food and drink as serious aesthetic objects base their arguments on the claim that taste and smell are inferior to vision and audition in providing us with representations of reality. Those who defend the aesthetic potential of food and drink attempt to show that food and drink do provide us with structured representations of the world.
A representation is a mental state, such as a belief, that stands for, refers to, or depicts something else, such as an object in the world. In perceptual experience, a representation specifies the way the world appears to a subject having the experience. Vision is the perceptual modality that arguably gives us the richest representation of reality. To see an apple is to locate it in space individuated from but in relation to other objects in our visual field. And that ability to locate objects is facilitated by assigning properties such as roundness and redness to the apple which appear, not as free-floating properties, but as properties bound to the object. The representation is veridical when the world is in fact as it appears in the representation.
Thus, vision does not present us with a heterogeneous heap of properties; rather properties are part of structured wholes with objects appearing as solid, individuated entities. Vision then is enormously helpful to us as we navigate through the world because it represents the spatial relations between things as well as their boundaries.
Many philosophers have argued that tastes and aromas lack essential elements of a representation. Read more »
Michelangelo’s Pietà “… not made of marble by a mortal hand, but divinely descended from Paradise!”
by John Hartley
“Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible.” Noted the Russian novelist Fydor Dostoevsky, “God and the devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.”
When 18th century Scholars used anthropology, physiognomy, and phrenology to apportion value according to race and beauty, clearly something has gone terribly wrong. Yet what is now dismissed as pseudoscience was then seen as a perfectly legitimate means to qualify human ‘beauty’. What, then, can be learnt from examining the critical juncture, as the departure from objective standards of beauty upon which such pernicious conclusions where not merely possible, but actively promoted?
The Enlightenment’s quest for knowledge and reason carried a darker side—one that linked ‘beauty’ with superiority. This fusion of science and aesthetics shaped European thought, whereby the pursuit of an aesthetic ideal became a gateway to racial ideologies. Read more »
I didn’t plan to write about Caspar David Friedrich for his 250th birthday. He belongs to a different time in my life and a different aesthetic pathology. But as the date edged closer, I found myself missing that impossible reach for the sublime that his work had once provoked in me.
I cannot not write about him.
The first time I became aware of Friedrich, many years ago, I was in Zurich to meet an elderly Jungian psychoanalyst—my head stuffed with theoretical questions and eerie dreams with soundtracks by Scriabin. Walking down the Bahnhofstrasse, I passed a bookstore window displaying a stunning art book with the elegant title Traum und Wahrheit (Dream and Truth) and a simple subtitle: Deutsche Romantik. I didn’t yet speak German, but I knew enough to be interested. The book was too heavy for my luggage. I bought it anyway and had it shipped.
What lured my eye to the cover as I passed by was a partial view from one of my now favorite Friedrich paintings, Das Große Gehege (The Great Enclosure)—a cool marshy landscape evoking real ones I would later see from train windows. How could just a corner of a painting have such power? It was the light, the late afternoon saturation of yellow, the black shadowed trees, and the hint of evening gloom already visible as gray on the horizon even though the sky above was still blue. I was captivated.
Later, it was the darkness that would keep me going back to his work.
Northern Sea in the Moonlight
Caspar David Friedrich loved the dark. He loved it so much that he got married at 6 am on a cold January morning, long before a Dresden sunrise. He often went out for walks along the Elbe at dawn or at dusk and lurked in the twilights or the moonlights, bringing home threads of illuminated thinking one can only have at night in the dark. I understand him. Darkness, with its tendency to distort as well as to obscure, is conducive to thinking in unlikely ways, offering a different kind of clarity that is difficult to achieve in daylight, when the light interferes demanding attention. Read more »
In an age where there is little agreement about anything, there is one assertion almost everyone agrees with—there is no disputing taste. If someone likes simple food instead of complex concoctions, who is to say that’s wrong. If I prefer bodice rippers to 19th Century Russian novels, you might say my tastes are crude and uncultured but hesitate to say one type of literary work is inherently better than the other. Aesthetic judgments are about subjective preference only. This is especially true of food and drink. Our preferences in this domain seem especially subjective. You can’t be wrong if you dislike chocolate ice cream can you?
But this view that aesthetic judgment can only be about subjective preferences misses a common experience that I imagine we all have from time to time. We experience something we acknowledge to be good, but we just don’t like it. For me, the aforementioned Russian novelists provide good examples; and don’t even mention James Joyce. Each of the several times I have tried to make it through Ulysses, I was persuaded of Joyce’s greatness in the first 20 pages while being thoroughly convinced that life is too short.
This coming apart of what we enjoy from what we deem “good” suggests that some aesthetic objects are more valuable than others. But on what grounds can we make such judgments? Today it seems as if we are more suspicious of appeals to values than we used to be. Over the past several decades, we’ve come to suspect that value judgements are too often based on illegitimate hierarchies and exclude people who don’t have the “right sort” of experience or training. No doubt, some value judgements are disguised assertions of cultural dominance. But in condemning value talk we don’t escape their grip on us. The accusation that someone is too judgmental has its own normative force. There is performative contradiction in judging someone for being too judgmental.
We can’t dispense with value judgments because we can’t avoid decisions about what is better or worse. Read more »
One longstanding debate in aesthetics concerns the relative virtues of formalism vs. contextualism. This debate, which preoccupied art theorists in the 20th Century, now rages in the culinary world of the 21st Century. Roughly, the controversy is about whether a work of art is best appreciated by attending to its sensory properties and their organization or should we focus on its meaning and the social, historical, or psychological context of its production. The debate is similar in the world of cuisine. How best should we appreciate the food or beverages we consume? Should we focus solely on the flavors and aromas or does authenticity and social context matter?
Formalists argue that works of art are fundamentally vehicles for sensory experience. In painting, the arrangement of lines, shapes, and colors are the primary source of aesthetic pleasure. In music it is harmonic structure, timbre, and the arrangement of musical themes and variations that matters. Narrative, depiction, meaning, and historical context may be interesting but are superfluous to genuine aesthetic value and tend to distract us from the sensory properties which constitute the essence of a work, so claim the formalists.
Diners, chefs, and critics who think that flavor is primary and questions about the origins of food and its authenticity are secondary seem to be channeling the formalist argument.
By contrast, contextualism places great emphasis on the fact that a work is created and appreciated at a particular time and place and by particular individuals. Facts about the social and historical context of a work are essential to it, not merely contingent features. According to contextualists, works lack clear meanings and determinate aesthetic properties when the conditions under which they are created and experienced are not the focal point of attention.
The discourse around food appreciation has taken a decidedly contextualist turn. Read more »
One of nature’s most endearing parlor tricks is the ripple effect. Drop a pebble into a lake and little waves will move out in concentric circles from the point of entry. It’s fun to watch, and lovely too, delivering a tiny aesthetic punch every time we see it. It’s also the well-worn metaphor for a certain kind of cause-and-effect, in which the effect part just keeps going and going. This metaphor is a perfect fit for one of the worst allisions in US maritime history, leading to the collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge after it was hit by the container ship MV Dali on the morning of March 26, 2024.
At that hour, long before dawn, it was too dark for the resulting ripple effect to be seen. But it was most certainly a hefty version of the pebble drop, with waves fanning out all the way to the harbor berth from which the Dali had just departed. At daybreak, when images of the disaster began to appear everywhere, the ripples were no longer visible. But given the catastrophic consequences of this event, and the tragic loss of life, they were, and still are, fanning out across the globe.
Am I the only one who can’t stop looking at images of this disaster? Am I the only one who sees an awful beauty in them? Or is it a beautiful awfulness? The frenzy of angles, the implosive intensity of the damage, the jolly Lego-like containers in Bauhaus colors still neatly stacked atop the ship in defiance of the tangled metal of the bridge’s cold steel mesh structure lying over the ship’s forecastle where it fell. Add to that the murky, shifting colors of the water, lending the disaster a visual context like a fluid frame—a calming contrast to the frozen pandemonium it encircles. Read more »
I live in Hoboken, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from Midtown Manhattan. I have been photographing the irises in the Eleventh Street flower beds since 2011. So far I have uploaded 558 of those photos to Flickr.
I took most of those photos in May or June. But there is one from April 30, 2021, and three from April 29, 2022. I took the following photograph on Monday, April 15, 2024 at 4:54 PM (digital cameras can record the date and time an image was taken). Why so early in April? Random variation in the weather I suppose.
That particular photo is an example of what I like to call the “urban pastoral,” I term I once heard applied to Hart Crane’s The Bridge.
Most of my iris photographs, however, do not include enough context to justify that label. They are just photographs of irises. I took this one on Friday, April 19, 2024 at 3:23 PM. Read more »
Is there such a thing as tasting expertise that, if mastered, would help us enjoy a dish or a meal? It isn’t obvious such expertise has been identified.
The most prominent model of tasting expertise is derived from the practice of wine tasting and has been extended to the assessment of cheese, coffee, chocolate, beer, spirits, and a variety of other products. These products are notably complex and exhibit flavors and aromas that are difficult to detect yet important to the quality of the product. The aim of expert tasters is to break the taste object into its component flavors, aromas, and textures so each element can be clearly identified and named with the help of flavor wheels that sort these flavors into categories. The expertise required for such analytic tasting is one of discernment—identifying hidden aromas or flavors that untrained tasters might miss. Analytic tasting is useful for assessing products, identifying the origin of a product, or training one’s ability to discern flavors. However, analytic tasting pays only cursory attention to how flavors and textures are then knit together to form a coherent whole.
By contrast, typical diners when enjoying a dish or meal are less interested in identifying hidden aromas or flavors and more interested in whether the elements fit together coherently. The enjoyment of complex dishes, as well as several dishes served as part of a meal, involves tasting relations between multiple taste objects rather than discrete, individual taste objects. But what kind of relations are we tasting? Part/whole relations would be the obvious type. For a dish or meal to be aesthetically successful, ingredients and flavors must be perceived as being fully integrated parts of a coherent whole.
In aesthetics, this relationship between whole and parts has traditionally been understood in terms of organic unity. Read more »
Something odd happens when I look at the elder Pieter Bruegel’s paintings: I experience a jolt of vertigo, as though I’d stepped out on a ledge somewhere—not too high up, but high enough to initiate a physical reaction more like titillation than terror. I didn’t notice this right away: For a long time, I was too busy taking in all the business going on in those paintings: the crowds, the tussles and bustle of the marketplace, the hawkers, the wagons, the houses, the animals, and in some of his works a topography rather alien to his own very flat province of North Brabant in the Netherlands. A master of ‘everything everywhere all at once,’ Bruegel knew how to crowd a wooden panel.
In The Fight between Carnival and Lent, faced with a multitude of finely-rendered characters alive with attitude, it’s easy to be distracted from the shot itself—its acute angle, its distance from the action, its extended scope and high horizon achieved through elevation. This is a classic content-over-form dialectic that faces every viewer looking at a painting. What am I seeing? What am I supposed to see? Where am I seeing from?
In this case ‘where am I seeing from’ has everything to do with ‘what am I seeing’’: It’s the high oblique angle that enables the viewer to take in all those individuals spread out over the market square. (An AI command to make each character look up at the painter, might force the viewer to think about where Bruegel is situated as he paints, even if he’s up there only in his imagination. It’s like the fourth wall: you’re unaware of it until a character turns and speaks to you directly.)
A cinematographer would recognize this as a crane shot, or its replacement, the drone shot. This crane or drone doesn’t move. It defines the POV (point of view) of the painter, and shows how far his perspective can reach and how much he can cram into the in-between, that 2D surface which expands vertically with every higher angle of his POV, as in this crane shot from Gone with the Wind. Read more »
In a previous post, I began to articulate a conception of gastronomic pleasure loosely based on Aristotle’s view that pleasure is the natural culmination of unimpeded activity. I make use of such an ancient theory because it strikes me as true that when we exercise fundamental human capacities, and that activity proceeds without impediments or obstacles, we experience pleasure. When we don’t get pleasure from activities that engage basic human capacities, it’s because we’re not very good at them or some obstacle to completion was put in our way.
Eating, and its component activity tasting, is one such exercise of basic capacities that naturally aims at pleasure when the food is good, the company is right, and one’s sensory mechanisms are functioning properly. Tasting involves the basic skill of pattern recognition. When we eat, we build memory images of what various foods taste like and whether we like them or not. When the flavor/texture patterns in the food we are eating match, without impediment, the memory image of that food (which include hedonic responses), we experience pleasure.
One virtue of this conception of taste is that it accommodates a central feature of our enjoyment of food—familiarity is an important value. We are naturally reticent about taking something into our bodies that might be unpleasant or dangerous. Thus, we experience enjoyment when a present stimulus conforms to the familiar hedonic patterns of past experience. But of course, that memory image of what food should taste like is constantly being updated. We learn to taste new foods if only to avoid boredom since our sensory mechanisms are designed to experience repeated stimuli less intensely. Read more »
It might strike you as odd, if not thoroughly antiquarian, to reach back to Aristotle to understand gastronomic pleasure. Haven’t we made progress on the nature of pleasure over the past 2500 years? Well, yes and no. The philosophical debate about the nature of pleasure, with its characteristic ambiguities and uncertainties, persists often along lines developed by the ancients. But we now have robust neurophysiological data about pleasure, which thus far has increased the number of hypotheses without settling the question of what exactly pleasure is.
Part of the problem is that we have this word “pleasure” that seems to apply to any positive affective state, and we therefore think there must be something common to all the diverse experiences designated by the word. But that unity may be an illusion. There is a vast experiential difference between the pleasures of basking in the sun and the pleasure one experiences from having run a marathon. I doubt that Aristotle’s theory can explain the former; the latter seems more amenable to his focus on activities which would include the pleasures of the table. And so I will set aside attempts to define pleasure in general and focus on the pleasure we take in our activities, specifically the activity of eating. Read more »
In debates about hedonism and the role of pleasure in life, we too often associate pleasure with passive consumption and then complain that a life devoted to passive consumption is unproductive and unserious. But this ignores the fact that the most enduring and life-sustaining pleasures are those in which we find joy in our activities and the exercise of skills and capacities. Most people find the skillful exercise of an ability to be intensely rewarding. Athletes train, musicians practice, and scholars study not only because such activities lead to beneficial outcomes but because the activity itself is satisfying.
The idea that there is a distinctive and uniquely rewarding form of pleasure generated by skillful activity is not a new idea. Aristotle argued that pleasure is the product of unimpeded activity. Since skills diminish impediments to our activity it follows that we take pleasure in skillful activity. More recently, in a research project that has now spanned several decades, the Hungarian/American psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi has understood the pleasure we take in skillful activity in terms of the concept of “flow,” a state of intense immersion in and focus on a task which is intrinsically rewarding.
The pleasure we experience from skillful activity is most often associated with a performance. It is less often associated with skillful perception. However, it isn’t obvious why the exercise of perceptual skills is not similarly rewarding. If so, that has implications for how we understand the nature of aesthetic experience. When we experience pleasure from viewing a painting, are the properties of the painting generating pleasure or are we taking pleasure in our own skill at apprehending those properties? If it is the latter, the capacity of a work of art to engage the skills of the viewer may be an element in evaluating a work. One enduring question in aesthetics is why we enjoy works that are grotesque, painful to experience, or just plain difficult to understand. If part of aesthetic pleasure is the satisfaction we experience in deploying perceptual skills, that question can be answered by the way in which the work engages perceptual or interpretive skills. Read more »
Aesthetic properties in art works are peculiar. They appear to be based on objective features of an object. Yet, we typically use the way a work of art makes us feel to identify the aesthetic properties that characterize it. However, dispassionate observer cases show that even when the feelings are absent, the aesthetic properties can still be recognized as such. Feelings seem both necessary yet unnecessary for appreciation of the work.
How do we square this circle?
When we ascribe to works of art properties such as beautiful, melancholy, mesmerizing, charming, ugly, awe-inspiring, magnificent, drab, or dynamic we are typically reporting how the work affects us, and we often use what we loosely call “feelings” to help in the ascription. A painting is charming if the viewer feels charmed. The architecture of a building is awe-inspiring if an admirer has the feeling of being awed. To say that a musical passage is beautiful but it leaves me uninspired and bored is peculiar and would require some special explanation for what is meant by “beautiful” in this case. We typically use the degree and kind of pleasure we feel about an object to be one measure of its beauty. The feelings involved in our response to artworks or other aesthetic objects need not be full blown emotions. As many commentators have pointed out, a sad song does not necessarily make one feel sad if you have nothing to be sad about. In fact, we often find sad songs exhilarating. Yet sad songs make us feel an analog to sadness which helps us attribute the property “sad” to the song.
In other words, there is something that it is like to feel charmed, awed, in the presence of beauty, or “sad-adjacent” that typically accompanies the identification of that property in an object. And the feeling state helps us identify the property. We know a film is amusing because it makes us feel amused, joyful because it sparks feelings of joy, etc.
But this raises a puzzle about dispassionate observers. Read more »
Flavors are nomads. They lurk in disparate ingredients and journey from dish to dish. They cross generations and geographical borders putting down roots in far-flung locations, pop up when least expected, and appear in different guises depending on specific mixtures and combinations. Flavors are a molecular flow continuously reshaping each other in reciprocal determination.
The task of gastronomy is to understand this complexity. But how? As I noted in a previous post, there appears to be no global similarity space mapping relations between flavors/aromas and no rules governing how they should be combined. Are there strategies for grasping this contingency and complexity?
In general, we humans have developed two strategies for dealing with complexity. The first, macro-reduction, is of ancient lineage. We develop a taxonomy of categories into which we can neatly slip any object we encounter, carving nature at its joints, as Plato wrote. Any phenomenon can be understood as a particular instance of a general category which can then serve as a norm to judge whether the phenomenon in question is a good example of its type.
In the food world, this means we think of flavors in terms of the ingredients and dishes in which they appear, which are then grouped according to the culture from which they emerge. We divide the world of cuisine into “Italian food,” “Chinese food,” “Mexican food, etc. and these categories guide our expectations about what food should taste like. Read more »
The author with Esin Çelebi Bayru, Rumi’s granddaughter (22nd generation) in Konya
I was so excited to meet Azra Bayru Kumcuoğlu, Rumi’s granddaughter (23rd generation) for breakfast on my latest visit to Istanbul— that I wore my pearls early in the morning and popped into a salon across from Boğaziçi University campus where I had been staying. Halfway through the blowout, it began to rain and by the time I stepped out, there was a proper downpour. I was irked, as was the hairstylist, but somewhere in my Pakistani heart, rain remains a thrill, a secret, contradictory gift that comes to awaken our dormant spark. Waiting outside the museum where we had planned to meet, I saw Azra Hanim rushing towards me; her spirit was instantly apparent. With the smile and embrace befitting a descendant of Maulana Rūm himself, she held her umbrella over me as we walked down slippery stairs; a stranger a millisecond ago suddenly felt like a sister. As we negotiated the traffic, the whipping wind and wet streets, Azra Hanim kept one arm firmly hooked into my mine to prevent me from slipping. This moment inspires a reflection on courtesy but its sweeping grace defies language; words slip like “a donkey in mud” when it comes to love— to offer that unforgettable metaphor of Rumi’s making. Azra Hanim’s was no ordinary social courtesy but a courtesy shaped by love, a value rigorously honed in the Sufi cultures as Adab.
Earlier on my visit, I had met Azra Hanim’s mother, the honorable Esin Çelebi Bayru in Konya and had interviewed her regarding her new book Love is Something Beautiful. The book is part family memoir, part history of the Mevlevi school of Sufism, and reveals, amidst the ebbs and flows of circumstance and socio-political demands, how the Mevlevi culture has survived in recent centuries. The theme that prevails throughout the book is the centrality of Adab. When I met her, I immediately felt her warmth. She carries herself with the ease of a satiated spirit, happy to pass on to others the peace she feels. We had multiple conversations in the days I spent in Konya, each was memorable. The two things that interested me most in the context of my own work of original poems and translations of Iqbal, was Mevlana Rumi’s early life and influences, and the practice of Adab in the Mevlevi culture and beyond. Read more »
Theories that specify which properties are essential for an object to be a work of art are perilous. The nature of art is a moving target and its social function changes over time. But if we’re trying to capture what art has become over the past 150 years within the art institutions of Europe and the United States, we must make room for the central role of creativity and originality. Objects worthy of the honorific “art” are distinct from objects unsuccessfully aspiring to be art by the degree of creativity or originality on display. (I am understanding “art” as a normative concept here.)
The creative theory of art emphasizes the distinctiveness of an artist’s vision or an artist’s ability to manipulate media in new ways as the defining feature of art. (Nick Zangwill offers one such theory in his book Aesthetic Creation.)
This picture of art as creativity is complicated in discussions about whether wine can be art. Although winemakers have vision and bring that vision of what a particular wine should taste like to the blending table, their art depends inevitably on nature and nature’s “creativity.” Some philosophers might hesitate to attribute creativity to nature. Nature has neither intentions nor vision. It lacks a subjectivity that can be expressed in a point of view. Yet, nature does produce continuous variation, especially with regard to wine grapes that are highly sensitive to differences in climate, weather, and soil. These variations are the raw material with which winemakers work. Whatever their aesthetic intentions, they are constrained and limited by the variations in their raw materials. Read more »
I was living in the Lafayette section of Jersey City at the time, just in from Communipaw Avenue on Van Horne, next to the Jackson Funeral Home, the largest black funeral home in the city and up the block from the Monumental Baptist Church. It was only a couple of weeks before Hurricane Sandy roared though at the end of October 2012, though no one knew she was coming at the time. I was at a meeting of the Morris Canal Community Development Corporation, chaired by June Jones, Executive Director.
One of agenda items involved adding a skate park to the Berry Lane Park that was closing in on a start date. I spoke in favor of it – indeed, I’d brought the idea to June a couple weeks before as it had been something I’d been pursuing for awhile – as did Musaddiq Ahmad and others. Musaddiq came up to me after the meeting and told me that if I wanted to see some interesting graffiti – which may have come up in the meeting as well, I don’t know, but somehow he knew of my interest – I should come down to a place on Pacific, just a couple of blocks away. Amazing graffiti all over the walls inside and in the alley out back as well.
As I recall what he said registered well enough, but it didn’t quite compute. Why not? Because I’d been photographing Jersey City graffiti for several years now and, while I certainly didn’t think I had it all, what Musaddiq was describing was a major cache of fresh graff right under my nose and I didn’t even some much as suspect it. But that’s how the world is sometimes. You just don’t know what’s right around the corner.
It seems as if everyone in the wine industry proclaims that wine tasting is subjective. Wine educators encourage consumers to trust their own palates. “There is no right or wrong when tasting wine,” I heard a salesperson say recently. “Don’t put much stock in what the critics say,” said a prominent winemaker to a large audience when discussing the aromas to be found in a wine. The point is endlessly promoted by wine writers. Wine tasting is wholly subjective. There is no right answer to what a wine tastes like and no standards of correctness for judging wine quality.
But no one in the wine industry actually believes this. Everyone from consumers and retail salespersons to wine critics and winemakers must distinguish good wine from bad wine and communicate that distinction to others. Ask any winemaker why she controls fermentation temperatures, and she will respond that doing so makes better wine. If wine quality were wholly subjective, there would be no reason to listen to anyone about wine quality. Wine education would be an oxymoron; quality control an exercise in futility; wine criticism just empty talk; price differentials based on nothing but marketing.
So what’s going on here? Why the self-deceptive denials and sotto voce acceptance that wine quality is a meaningful concept. We could speculate about why we’re so enamored with subjectivity—freedom from constraint in matters of taste I suppose. But it’s been going on since the 16th century, if we can blame Descartes. Read more »
Wine and music pairing is becoming increasingly popular, and the effectiveness of using music to enhance a wine tasting experience has received substantial empirical confirmation. (I summarized this data and the aesthetic significance of wine and music pairing last month on this site.) But to my knowledge there is no guide to how one should go about wine and music pairing. Are there pairing rules similar to the rules for pairing food and wine? Is there expertise involved that requires practice and experience?
In fact, there are no rules for pairing food and wine. Every so-called rule is subject to so many exceptions, it is misleading to think of these guidelines as rules. Yes, white wine often goes well with seafood but not always, and there are some red wines that are enjoyable with seafood. The same is true when pairing music with wine. There are general guidelines with many exceptions. Thus, like food and wine pairing, experience is important, and some expertise can be helpful. Below I describe my own process for generating wine and music pairings and the generalizations that can be drawn from it. Read more »
For many wine lovers, understanding wine is hard work. We study maps of wine regions and their climates, learn about grape varietals and their characteristics, and delve into various techniques for making wine, trying to understand their influence on the final product. Then we learn a complex but arcane vocabulary for describing what we’re tasting and go to the trouble of decanting, choosing the right glass, and organizing a tasting procedure, all before getting down to the business of tasting. This business of tasting is also difficult. We sip, swish, and spit trying to extract every nuance of the wine and then puzzle over the whys and wherefores, all while comparing what we drink to other similar wines. Some of us even take copious notes to help us remember, for future reference, what this tasting experience was like.
In the meantime, we argue with each other on Twitter fighting over whether a wine is terroir-driven or a technological abomination, typical or atypical, over-oaked or under ripe. We scour Wine Spectator‘s Annual Top 100 looking for who’s up and who’s down and complain about inflated wine scores and overblown wine language.
In other words, we really seem to care about getting it right, identifying a wine’s essence and properly locating it in the wine firmament. We want our judgments to conform to the actual properties of a wine and its relations. Read more »
In philosophical debates about the aesthetic potential of cuisine, one central topic has been the degree to which smell and taste give us rich and structured information about the nature of reality. Aesthetic appreciation involves reflection on the meaning and significance of an aesthetic object such as a painting or musical work. Part of that appreciation is the apprehension of the work’s form or structure—it is often the form of the object that we find beautiful or otherwise compelling. Although we get pleasure from consuming good food and drink, if smell and taste give us no structured representation of reality there is no form to apprehend or meaning to analyze, so the argument goes. The enjoyment of cuisine then would be akin to that of basking in the sun. It is pleasant to be sure but there is nothing to apprehend or analyze beyond an immediate sensation.
The first time I became aware of Friedrich, many years ago, I was in Zurich to meet an elderly Jungian psychoanalyst—my head stuffed with theoretical questions and eerie dreams with soundtracks by Scriabin. Walking down the Bahnhofstrasse, I passed a bookstore window displaying a stunning art book with the elegant title Traum und Wahrheit (Dream and Truth) and a simple subtitle: Deutsche Romantik. I didn’t yet speak German, but I knew enough to be interested. The book was too heavy for my luggage. I bought it anyway and had it shipped.
What lured my eye to the cover as I passed by was a partial view from one of my now favorite Friedrich paintings, Das Große Gehege (The Great Enclosure)—a cool marshy landscape evoking real ones I would later see from train windows. How could just a corner of a painting have such power? It was the light, the late afternoon saturation of yellow, the black shadowed trees, and the hint of evening gloom already visible as gray on the horizon even though the sky above was still blue. I was captivated.
In an age where there is little agreement about anything, there is one assertion almost everyone agrees with—there is no disputing taste. If someone likes simple food instead of complex concoctions, who is to say that’s wrong. If I prefer bodice rippers to 19th Century Russian novels, you might say my tastes are crude and uncultured but hesitate to say one type of literary work is inherently better than the other. Aesthetic judgments are about subjective preference only. This is especially true of food and drink. Our preferences in this domain seem especially subjective. You can’t be wrong if you dislike chocolate ice cream can you?
One longstanding debate in aesthetics concerns the relative virtues of formalism vs. contextualism. This debate, which preoccupied art theorists in the 20th Century, now rages in the culinary world of the 21st Century. Roughly, the controversy is about whether a work of art is best appreciated by attending to its sensory properties and their organization or should we focus on its meaning and the social, historical, or psychological context of its production. The debate is similar in the world of cuisine. How best should we appreciate the food or beverages we consume? Should we focus solely on the flavors and aromas or does authenticity and social context matter?
One of nature’s most endearing parlor tricks is the ripple effect. Drop a pebble into a lake and little waves will move out in concentric circles from the point of entry. It’s fun to watch, and lovely too, delivering a tiny aesthetic punch every time we see it. It’s also the well-worn metaphor for a certain kind of cause-and-effect, in which the effect part just keeps going and going. This metaphor is a perfect fit for one of the worst allisions in US maritime history, leading to the collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge after it was hit by the container ship MV Dali on the morning of March 26, 2024.
Is there such a thing as tasting expertise that, if mastered, would help us enjoy a dish or a meal? It isn’t obvious such expertise has been identified.
A cinematographer would recognize this as a crane shot, or its replacement, the drone shot. This crane or drone doesn’t move. It defines the POV (point of view) of the painter, and shows how far his perspective can reach and how much he can cram into the in-between, that 2D surface which expands vertically with every higher angle of his POV, as in this crane shot from Gone with the Wind. 
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It might strike you as odd, if not thoroughly antiquarian, to reach back to Aristotle to understand gastronomic pleasure. Haven’t we made progress on the nature of pleasure over the past 2500 years? Well, yes and no. The philosophical debate about the nature of pleasure, with its characteristic ambiguities and uncertainties, persists often along lines developed by the ancients. But we now have robust neurophysiological data about pleasure, which thus far has increased the number of hypotheses without settling the question of what exactly pleasure is.
In debates about hedonism and the role of pleasure in life, we too often associate pleasure with passive consumption and then complain that a life devoted to passive consumption is unproductive and unserious. But this ignores the fact that the most enduring and life-sustaining pleasures are those in which we find joy in our activities and the exercise of skills and capacities. Most people find the skillful exercise of an ability to be intensely rewarding. Athletes train, musicians practice, and scholars study not only because such activities lead to beneficial outcomes but because the activity itself is satisfying.
Aesthetic properties in art works are peculiar. They appear to be based on objective features of an object. Yet, we typically use the way a work of art makes us feel to identify the aesthetic properties that characterize it. However, dispassionate observer cases show that even when the feelings are absent, the aesthetic properties can still be recognized as such. Feelings seem both necessary yet unnecessary for appreciation of the work.
Theories that specify which properties are essential for an object to be a work of art are perilous. The nature of art is a moving target and its social function changes over time. But if we’re trying to capture what art has become over the past 150 years within the art institutions of Europe and the United States, we must make room for the central role of creativity and originality. Objects worthy of the honorific “art” are distinct from objects unsuccessfully aspiring to be art by the degree of creativity or originality on display. (I am understanding “art” as a normative concept here.)
It seems as if everyone in the wine industry proclaims that wine tasting is subjective. Wine educators encourage consumers to trust their own palates. “There is no right or wrong when tasting wine,” I heard a salesperson say recently. “Don’t put much stock in what the critics say,” said a prominent winemaker to a large audience when discussing the aromas to be found in a wine. The point is endlessly promoted by wine writers. Wine tasting is wholly subjective. There is no right answer to what a wine tastes like and no standards of correctness for judging wine quality.
Wine and music pairing is becoming increasingly popular, and the effectiveness of using music to enhance a wine tasting experience has received substantial empirical confirmation. (I summarized this data and the aesthetic significance of wine and music pairing 
For many wine lovers, understanding wine is hard work. We study maps of wine regions and their climates, learn about grape varietals and their characteristics, and delve into various techniques for making wine, trying to understand their influence on the final product. Then we learn a complex but arcane vocabulary for describing what we’re tasting and go to the trouble of decanting, choosing the right glass, and organizing a tasting procedure, all before getting down to the business of tasting. This business of tasting is also difficult. We sip, swish, and spit trying to extract every nuance of the wine and then puzzle over the whys and wherefores, all while comparing what we drink to other similar wines. Some of us even take copious notes to help us remember, for future reference, what this tasting experience was like.