Talking about food

In order to account for the obviously glib inanity of this post, let me start by stressing its especially purposive nature; that is, as you are well aware I cannot stand conversations about food, but in order to avoid completely alienating myself from many people I care about I have decided to try and find a way to make these conversations bearable.  My solution? To pretend they are talking about art.

Now bare with me here. Let's take a few co-ordinates:

•        The spectrum that consists of Rirkrit's version of relationality on one pole and the riposte in Documenta.
  
•       Bin's Korean art critic who talked about all art exclusively in descriptives of shit.
  

Perhaps the co-ordinates traaced by this debate didn't go far enough, and this comparison is under theorised. So why could using this vocabulary be useful?

• 1.     It allows us to account for the fact that aesthetic experience is conditioned not only by sense but by contextual framing. Example: A date eaten on a hot day at a desert market is much tastier than one eaten at a city supermarket. (Relationality 1)
  
• 2.     It allows us to account for the fact that aesthetic experience is conditioned not only by sense but by symbolic content. Example: A date eaten by a migrant who has not eaten these dates since the day they left their homeland is even better. (Relationality 2)
  
• 3.     It allows us to refer to the ideological/critical/theoretical substance of a work as a type of nutritional content. Example: A date may be sweet in terms of its aesthetic, but it is richer than wiz fizz. A date tagine is even better.
  
• 4.     It allows us to talk about process in a way that might be useful in a cooked-baked-fried structuralist type of way; particularly with respect to semiotic techniques. Example: A tagine is a stew in which signs are melted together, but if you are just drying dates and packaging them, well you aren't doing much.
  
• 5.     It mirrors the fact that a work is not reducible to an explanation or concept of the work. That is, because there is no replacement for having to chew something for one's self, there is a process of eating and digestion that can be talked about. In this context some didactic work could be called pre digested, or over-determined.
  
• 6.     It offers a metaphor in which form is reduced to a position I would argue is more appropriate. For example, I like the way you presented that meal in the form of Bernard Black towers with turrets, but nevertheless, I especially liked it because instead of using spoons I had to eat the meal using mini trebuchets.  
  

Ok. I really do understand how stupid this is, but, next time I am stuck in some decadent brunch conversation I will be thinking about what art work they might be talking about and reverse engineering it in my mind.