Cursed Tongue: Blue Plate Special: Cheese and Bacon on Toast

Posted by CursedTongue on July 4, 2006

If you want to keep me busy for a few hours, take me to an art museum. If you never want to see me again, leave me in Florence. Last week we visited the beautiful, Vespa-ridden city of Florence (Italy, not South Carolina) for a deliriously hot and dizzyingly whirlwind tour. My goal was to look at art until my eyes bled.

Unfortunately, my feet and heat-exhausted body gave out first. (I vaguely recollect a moment of blithering insanity, spouting angry nonsense at my fellow travelers in the street because we were in too much of a rush to stop for gelato or water.) But if I don’t see a naked body or a depiction of the Madonna for a while, I would be more than okay with that.

A companion on the trip, who probably never dreams about living in an art museum, told us that she has an art collection. I was surprised to hear this, because she was one of the people in our group always waiting for us laggards at the museum café. Apparently, she collects pictures of pigs dressed like people. I asked her if she had one of pigs playing poker. I don’t think she found that amusing, because I didn’t get an answer.

I couldn’t recall having seen any paintings, or sculptures of pigs in the Uffizi, except for maybe if I had squinted at the marble busts of the plumpest members of the Medici family they would have looked at least a little like hogs. So I figured that must be why she wasn’t nearly as impressed with the Florentine art museums as I was.

An art professor I know separates curds of art from the whey by classifying it as art or cheese. Most any Elvis painted on velvet, is probably, assuredly cheese, and not just any cheese but highly processed American cheese. Botticelli’s Allegory of Spring, on the other (paint-smeared) hand, is art. One can look at that painting for hours studying line and brush stroke, perspective and light, interpreting and reinterpreting meaning. In fact, I did. My husband was glad there were plenty of benches in that room.

If artist, Damien Hirst, can assemble a pile of cigarette butts, beer bottles, and partially eaten sandwiches and call it art, I think we can call the night janitor who put the masterpiece in plastic bags and tossed it in the trash a critic. Within art there’s a lot of room for interpretation, and if I’m pressed to admit, pigs in tutus. One could argue that a turd on a blue plate is art. In fact, the mere act of displaying something, like human waste on a plate, in an art gallery turns it into art. Kind of the way putting a minor offender in prison for possession of 2 ounces of pot can turn them into a hardened criminal.

For example, last week The Royal Academy in London displayed a slab of slate and a bone-shaped support, rejecting the sculpture of a head intended to rest on the support, which artist David Hensel had painstakingly crafted. The museum was blatantly unapologetic for choosing the base of a piece and depositing the actual sculpture in storage.

I think the attitude of The Royal Academy goes a long way towards explaining the lack of understanding and appreciation that many people have for modern art. It would be easy to alienate an audience, who, after studying a piece entitled “One Day Closer to Paradise,” finds out that they were contemplating mortality over a platform and a stick carefully selected by a knowledgeable museum committee.

As for the veneration of saccharine anthropomorphous swine photography as an art form, I still believe that cutesy pig pictures are meant to hang next to such schmaltzy treasures as the “Hang in There” kitten. Dressing the pigs as butchers or members of Congress would at least be a statement, but I somehow doubt that is the point of our pig lover’s collection. I can safely call a portrait of a pig with a bow on its head a ham and cheese sandwich – at least in terms of its relationship to art. Cheese won’t die as long as people are still purchasing vaguely creepy pictures of 5-year-olds dressed as bride and groom.

However, I would have to call much of the actual cheese that I ate on the trip art. (Yes, it was that good. And yes, there’s no way that I walked through enough museums to work it all off.) Now that I think about it, the prosciutto I had for breakfast nearly every morning was also artistically delectable. So I suppose that means that pork and coagulated milk did figure into my art appreciation of Florence. And any experience of Florence wouldn’t be complete without the cheese and the art.

- Sarah Letnes

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