Off The Menu
I enjoyed the film, it wasn’t deep but it was fun. And i guess that’s all I really have to say about that, happy days then.
I liked it but I did not agree with one little thing it took for granted.
The Menu functions in different ways and on different levels, generally a feature for any good piece of art.
One way The Menu functions is as a critique of the effects of capitalism on art. The points it makes are well made although also well known and I’m not going to discuss them.
For that critique to really work the way The Menu wants it to work however we have to accept that cooking is a form of art, on a par with any other (I mean that really, The Menu puts forward cooking as an art form the same way that writing, music, sculpture etc. are, it is not meant to be taken allegorically or metaphorically or any sort of orically at all — they mean it)
As you will have immediately understood from the previous sentence, I do not accept it. It would not be needed to point out the prerequisite of The Menu that cooking is an art if I accepted it.
Of course in not accepting cooking as an art I am quite in contradiction to the most commonly held beliefs of our age, a belief which I have sometimes fallen prey to myself, but for me it is a belief that requires a sufficient amount of drugs to take hold, and if the drugs are insufficient or dwindling in the direction of sensibility then I find the belief dwindles likewise.
That belief can be summed up by this quote from Man On Fire —
A Man Can be An Artist At Anything
It is a great line, except that you might wonder what about Women? But Walken’s character does mention his wife’s cooking as being a high art at some point so I guess it’s an allowable vernacular usage.
Great line or not it is obviously inane, if it were true one could be an artist of shit. I think you will find that if you try to construct a non-ludicrous example of someone who is an artist of shit it will actually be that they are performance artists of some sort and their shit is a component of their performance.
Otherwise as endearing as the idea is the great master of shit is not, at this very moment, hunched in some warehouse squeezing out especially intricate turds using nothing but their imagination and a fine-tuned rectum capable of astonishing levels of control.
This is a way in which we can say that The Menu shows us an artistic process, the fine dining experience on display is part of a performance and the food produced during this performance is an integral component.
A Digression
It’s a well known urban myth that during WWI a poet or artist was reproached by a society matron for not joining the army and fighting to protect civilization, his response was reportedly:
I am the civilization they are fighting for.
Now, putting aside conceit and what one thinks regarding requirements of military service, there is a brutal truth that might be acknowledge when the person making the statement is a poet or a painter or a practitioner of one of the classical arts, and which would be laughed out loud at if they were a chef.
Why is cooking itself not an art
No matter how great a culinary culture our world has produced, the cooks of that culture have not thought they exemplified the civilization that wars were fought to protect.
One reason for this is that cooking can never produce narrative
There can be no intrinsic or even extrinsic narrative to a piece of food — there can only be The Authoritative Imposition Of Narrative —
I personally detest this form of narrative and cannot consider it with impartiality. It seems ridiculous that after removing narrative from the art that the artist then tries to impose narrative by telling you what the art represents and means, either the art can stand on its own as a purely visual experience or it cannot.
This authoritative imposition of narrative attempts not just to establish a narrative, but to lock down the interpretation of that narrative. As such it is related to the needs of the censor to when speaking about art
The Restaurateur’s Authoritative Imposition of Narrative
Often in finer dining experiences there is a part before the food is placed on the plate where someone, a functionary of the kitchen, comes out and introduces the food to you.
It is the most tedious introduction you will ever receive in your life, introductions to minor nobility at a genealogical convention when you have stumbled in asking directions to the bathroom are more interesting.
This is not like the introductions to the courses we receive in The Menu, the most important differences being that the introductions are extremely well written and spoken by Ralph Fiennes and that they have a direct relation to survival chances of the diners — a thing apt to make any speech tremendously dramatic and gripping.
Instead the run of the mill course introduction will talk about the farm where this or that ingredient was grown by people who are doing interesting new things in the ingredient growing game while living the good life. It’s an authoritative imposition of narrative — but a consistently boring one.
As already noted it could be a performance, but it never is, I don’t think there is any dining experience that actually makes the effort to hire a trained actor / performer of some sort. I would appreciate a magician for my meals. Maybe appreciate is too strong a word, but at least magicians tend to have training in performance.
As a personal aside the worst part is when they tell stories about the wine. The only thing they did with the wine is store it at the right temperature and uncork it, at least they actually prepared the food.
By what rights are they introducing this wine!? It’s like a person who saw me across the street at a busy intersection the day before going and introducing me the people using the crosswalk today.
This complaint about wine may however be affected by my absolute hatred of the stuff. I have never tasted a wine I liked, and everybody always thinks you need to try a new wine that tastes like all the other ones to me. Now when I go out to eat they introduce me the wine, and when I say I don’t want to even talk to the wine or look at its insipid bottle they get offended by my aesthetic loutishness.
Food as Art takes advantage of Subjectivity
In an earlier article
We discussed the tendency in the Boomer and Millennial generations to argue for complete subjectivity when it comes to matters of art. This of course has the strength of decreasing snobbery where art is concerned, hand in hand with the weakness of inability (or perhaps just disinterest) at identifying if art is good or not, among adherents of the Subjectivist Faith.
It has been a source of amazement that people who believe there is no objective value in any of the traditional arts, and refuse to be snobbish about things that throughout human history people have been snobbish about, as all that is a matter of taste, nonetheless claim that cooking is an artform and have no limit to how snobby they can become about the value of modern cuisine.
People who are quick to say about taste that there can be no disputation in the context of the various arts will look down with great enjoyment and self-congratulation when criticizing directly the sense of taste — deriding those who prefer junk food, or burn their steaks too much destroying the flavor, or are liking instant coffee or milk chocolate or even white chocolate. Poor taste in literature is a personal choice, but poor taste in food is treated as contemptible.
Food as Art has no distributed Mana
Mana is a force that can be cultivated in people and objects as a means for identifying the experiential value of art.
Objects can have personal Mana of course, for example a favorite coat that you look at it all the time But objects generally described as being Art have Mana that extends beyond the personal, this is because any person can see the art and experience it.
Food does not in itself have any Mana on anything but a personal level, and, perhaps I am too harsh, but I do not see it as having any Mana on even a personal level. The Meal you eat cannot be eaten tomorrow by someone else, unless the aforementioned artist of shit makes their appearance. You may have a memory of the Meal, but you cannot go and taste the Meal again — you can at best taste a similar Meal in similar surroundings at some future time. The meal does not have Mana.
In a previous article describing Art as a tool for storing Mana written by IG Agents 18, 77 and 86, condensing more voluminous works on this subject, it was noted
This mnemonic function is a common one of objects with Mana, as we interact with the object we build up memories of all our thoughts and attractions to that object, which in every subsequent interaction get recalled — strengthening the bonds of Mana that we feel.
Now it is true that mnemonic functionality has been ascribed to food in the past, especially À la recherche du temps perdu
However, while eating some particular meal can provide the mnemonic functionality while eating it, once that meal is eaten later meals, even prepared by the same chef has too great a variant in mnemonic function to be useful. Thus one of the major benefits that a work of art can provide is not found in the meal.
Furthermore interacting with a work of art will itself prompt experiences that later interactions with the same work can bring back to the mind, allowing for deeper understanding of the artwork each time it is accessed. This again is obviously missing from a piece of cooking.
There is no Memetic manipulation possible in a Meal
This relates to the impossibility of constructing narrative intrinsically in a Meal, the reason that this is the case is because there is no Memetic manipulation possible.
Memetics is that branch of knowledge related to the study of evolution and distribution of knowledge, the name is based on Genetics, and just as Genetics is the study of Genes, Memetics assumes the existence of a small unit of information named a Meme (not really related to the common Internet usage of Meme).
The Oxford English Dictionary defines a Meme as
an element of a culture or system of behaviour passed from one individual to another by imitation or other non-genetic means.
Memetic change happens in the human brain as it associates pictures or language or audio fragments with similar things, for example one might see a picture and associate with a text that has some relevance. So obviously to have Narrative one needs to also allow for the more primitive Memetic manipulation of the content that will be used to build the Narrative in the human mind.
This can of course happen with a Meal, but just as with mnemonic functionality as the Meal is consumed and is no longer available the Memetic manipulations cannot be accessed by the brain or taken even further.
As the Meal is gone the Memes that the brain relates the experience of the Meal to cannot reflect back on to the Meal, as opposed to how a Picture can cause Memetic language structures and then those structures can affect your interpretation of the Picture when it is returned to later. The Experience of a Meal being always transitory means that the ability of a Memetic effects to reflect back on the Media is severely diminished.
Obviously other artistic media can be at times transitory, and most artistic forms were far more transitory in the past than they are in the present. It is not the transitory nature of eating that prevents a Meal from being a Work of Art, but it doesn’t help.
Minimal Emotional Expressiveness of Art is unmet
Let us call this the Turing completeness test of Art. This is why the ability to manipulate memes and narrative are important as potential uses in an art.
The minimal expressiveness of art requirement is that any emotional state of a human can be conveyed by that art. This does not mean that every attempt to convey an emotional state in art must be successful and obviously it does not have to work for conveying emotional states to people that are in some way not able to feel emotions in the same ways as the general human population, but we should know the art is able to convey these emotional states with a good deal of accuracy to much of the population.
Food, even prepared by the greatest of chefs does not seem able to convey the idea of heartbreak or sadness, weariness. I do not mean that the food will make you weary — a book can convey the emotional state of weariness without causing the emotional state of weariness, the book in conveying sadness can in fact make people happy while causing a deeper understanding of sadness itself.
Common Idea Expressiveness of Art is Unmet
Art should be able to communicate ideas.
For this there are two levels
1 — it should be possible to communicate any simple idea in any Art (although not necessarily in all forms of that art), a simple idea should be anything describable in one sentence without any punctuation breaking up the thought.
As an example the idea:
Old People envy the freedom of youth.
Should be easy to convey in any Art, although in Music it might need the human voice to convey the idea most succinctly.
2 — In theory it should be possible to convey any idea or sequence of ideas found in one Art in any other, however in practice the practical usages of a particular Art may prevent this from being perfectly realizable.
For example a Novel can, via long detailed passages convey more complicated ideas than are practical to do in music or any of the graphical arts, but that said we can theorize that someone with infinite resources could build a collection of statues conveying the ideas of an Infinite Jest.
Food, prepared by even the greatest chef has difficulty conveying the simplest ideas. Prepare for me a dish that will convey to me the idea that Old People envy the freedom of youth and I will rescind this part and indeed probably admit cooking is an Art and that Chefs are artists, but the idea must be conveyed via eating alone — no allowance for a man in a white coat coming in from the Kitchen and telling me what idea the delicious souffle before me shall cause to form in my mind.
General Qualities of Art
There are a few other more complicated behaviors exhibited by Art forms, but these should probably be addressed in another article.
But for us here and now I think we can list things that the products of the other arts can do (although sometimes with difficulty, sometimes only certain forms of the Art under discussion) — by products of the arts I mean of course Poems and Stories are products of Literature , Songs and Instrumental works are products of Music, and so on.
Heuristics for Determining if an activity is an Art
These are sorted in the level of importance, simplicity, and necessity.
- Can the product of the activity convey any and all human emotional states?
- Can the product of this activity convey simple, one sentence ideas, expressible without punctuation
- Can the product of this activity theoretically convey any and all ideas expressible in any of the classical arts. (this is not that important, hence the “theoretically”)
- Is memetic manipulation possible via the product of the activity — can returning to the ideas expressed in the potential art spark new ideas that relate to the original. If the art conveys the idea that Old Age envies the Freedom of Youth will further examination of the art cause other related ideas to be raised — Youth Fears the restraints of Old Age for example, or Old Age envies the freedom of Youth, just as Intelligence envies the Freedom of Idiocy — note that the ideas that come from memetic manipulation of the immediate ideas do not need to have the same simplicity, the only requirement is that ideas transmitted to an audience of the potential art should be able to change and evolve.
- Does the product of an activity have distributable Mana — that is to say a meal may have Mana to those who take part in it but how do they convey that to others? Again this is a heuristic, many specific instances of Art will not have the possibility of distributing Mana to anyone who was unable to directly interact with the art at a particular time and place — but it becomes suspicious if by its nature an activity can only ever have personal Mana.
As noted previously a Meal, the product of cooking, does not have any of these requirements. A branch of performance in which the meal can be part of that performance could conceivably be a form of art, which is really what The Menu presents us with — a performance in which a Meal is an integral component of the performance.
Performance is an Art, and cooking is a craft that can be used to support Performance.
And that is really all I have to say about The Menu, other than to note that I have read a lot of people say they wanted a Cheeseburger at the denouement but I didn’t — I wanted S’mores.
This Articles was written mainly by Illuminati Ganga Agent 13, with some input from 6, 77, and 19.
Previous Articles that relate to this one
