The ubiquity of food in every aspect of cultural and social life puts the lie to traditions that reject taste and sensual gratification—the pleasures of nourishment—as the basis for the highest aesthetic experience. If Aristotle and Hegel regarded taste as the lowest, most ‘animal’ of the senses and, thanks to their distancing operations the visual and acoustic senses as the highest, the language of the senses speaks otherwise: gustus and sapor relate to knowledge and wisdom just as ‘taste’ remains synonymous for culture and aesthetic judgment. That the famous Kantian rejection of sensual gratification as aesthetic occurred just as gastronomy began to emerge as a properly artistic discourse suggests that the meanings of food have never been properly ‘digested’ by either aesthetic or art historical traditions. Focusing on European art of the later eighteenth through nineteenth centuries, this course takes food as a kind of universal subject for art history, a means of testing the substance and limits of social, iconographic, semiotic, geographical, and critical theoretical approaches, and of exploring the relationships between art history and visual culture.
View complete course outline: ARTH474A2010 [.pdf]