(2012-10-28) Foodism As New High Culture

William Deresiewicz thinks Foodism has become the new high Culture. *Foodism has taken on the sociological characteristics of what used to be known — in the days of the rising postwar Middle Class, when Mortimer Adler was peddling the Great Books and Leonard Bernstein was on television — as culture. It is costly. It requires knowledge and connoisseurship, which are themselves costly to develop. It is a badge of membership in the higher classes, an ideal example of what Thorstein Veblen, the great social critic of the Gilded Age, called conspicuous consumption. It is a vehicle of status aspiration and competition, an ever-present occasion for snobbery, one-upmanship and social aggression... Food now expresses the symbolic values and absorbs the spiritual energies of the educated class. It has become invested with the Meaning Of Life.

But food, for all that, is not art. Both begin by addressing the senses, but that is where food stops. It is not narrative or representational, does not organize and express emotion.* I'm not sure much real Art was created by the oldsters' art-snobbery either. And there is value in embracing any of The Craft-s.