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I have a piece in the Times, here, about the Spanish chef, Ferran Adria, being invited to 'exhibit' at the five-yearly Documenta art show in Kassel, Germany. Here's an extract:
The invitation has, predictably, caused uproar in the art world. Jose de la Sota, art critic of El PaIs, put it this way: “Adria is not Picasso. Picasso did not know how to cook but he was better than Adria [at art]. What is art now? Is it something or nothing?”
He might indeed ask: many of us have been wondering for quite a while, when we see elephant dung, protest banners and piles of bricks winning art prizes. Clement Greenberg, the most influential critic of modern art, defined it as “the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticise the discipline itself”. That seems to me as good a definition of Adria’s style of food as any I have read.