Are Chefs Artists, or does this belong in IMHO?
there is a quote going something like this
there are only 6 art forms that matter: cooking, literature, music, painting, sculpting and architecture(the last one being a sub-discipline of cake-building)
will try to find the real quote later
I’d call it an art, yes. It’s certainly an aesthetic endeavor. The intent is to be pleasing to the sense of taste and smell, just as visual art attempts to please the visual. Cooking touches in no small part on the visual as well.
I’d say, like so many other awesome endeavours, it’s both art and science.
Also: mmmmmmm curry. 
Anthony Bourdain wrote (and I can’t remember his exact words) that “cooking is not an art, it’s a craft. An ‘artist’ is someone who doesn’t believe it’s necessary to show up to work on time.”
I would agree. Being a chef is not just about creativity; it also requires being able to do things a consistent way every time, and demands the ability to work as part of a team in a highly stressful environment. A chef who isn’t respected by the cooks under him won’t have his job for long. The creative elements aside, the job has more in common with being a contractor or factory foreman than it does with an “artist” in the sense that the OP is using.
I went to cooking school AND I went to art school. (And, for what it is worth, I have drank way too much tequila and made out with Tony Bourdain – back before he was a writer).
And with all due respect to Argent Towers, I disagree wholeheartedly.
There are a ton of chefs out there who ARE technicians and who cannot create but can only repeat what they have been taught by rote. As an artist, there are things I have to do “consistent[ly]… every time” but that is true in any profession. It is being able to see what elements can be changed, for better or for worse, to alter the creation. There are far too many chefs who do not have that ability but those who do – and do so successfully – are artists.
One who paints in oils must learn very specific, consistent techniques in order to paint said oil paintings just as a chef must learn very specific techniques to create a specific dish; but each can alter and adjust chemicals and colors and layers to an end result which might be different every time. To me there is no difference; just in what is learned and how it is applied.
Okay - that may be the case. So then, you’re saying that not all chefs are “artists,” only some of them. So then what are the chefs who are not “artists”? I would assume this would mean the majority of chefs.
Similarly there are probably a lot of painters (not house painters, painters of paintings) out there who don’t have any kind of individual style, they just copy the styles of other painters. Are these painters not artists?
Stradivarius was a craftsman, I don’t think it’s any aspersion at all to call cooks craftsmen.
The analogy would really be more apt if you were talking about copying entire paintings, not just styles.
But yes, most people who cook for a living aren’t cooking their own dishes, but are just duplicating the established recipe for the kitchen. Even if you’re making something as simple as salad dressing, you’re making it the way the house (either the head chef or [shudder] the corporate book) says to make it. It’s true that making your own recipes is the exception rather than the rule, and it’s the goal of serious chefs to get to a point where they’re able to do that. It’s a privileged position
Having said that, though, the ones who make it to that level really are working on a more purely creative level that can fairly be called art. Some of them can be quite radically creative and experimental (the molecular gastronomy movement, for instance). Professionally speaking, Cooking sort of amounts to a few artists who each have a bunch of trained technicians working for them to duplicate their pieces (since cooking is the only art that has to be duplicated from scratch for each person who consumes it), but the creation of the dish itself is artistic.
Of course, that really only applies at a professional level. At an amateur level, individuals are artists all the time. The first stoner who dumped a box of Whoppers into a bucket of popcorn was an artist.
OP: By “chef” do you mean anyone who cooks professionally, or someone who creates his* own recipes?
(*and why are so many professional chefs/cooks male?)
Wherever it belongs, it certainly wasn’t a General Question. IMHO would have been OK, but since it’s about things artistic, let’s move it from GQ to Cafe Society.
samclem Moderator
I have been watching the series At the Table with… which features many of North Americas best chefs. What surprises me is how many of them didn’t really set out to be chefs, they discovered it as a calling.
Thats how I arrived at it. I’ve cooked in restaurants since I was 14 to pay for college. 3 years into my education, it dawned on me that I loved it too much to stop. It meant moving to the east coast and 4 more years of school, but it couldnt have turned out better.
I live in the Twin Cities now, and it seems that they call anyone in charge of a kitchen “the Chef”. Most of them would be cutting vegetables in a kitchen run by a real chef. I wouldnt be snotty enough to call myself an artist in a million years. Thats the food critics job.:dubious: While I love the creative process, I really get jazzed when we are busy as hell and the crew is kicking ass like a well oiled machine.
I like to make pretty plates as much as the next guy, but the artistry to me is in changing your menu in congress with the availability of things in season. It keeps it interesting for your guests, and keeps your food cost down.
I think of art as an expression. Chefs really don’t do that. Of course some do that, but to sell food you have t be consistant.
Suppose an artist churned out the same painting every single time? A chef must do this. I think there is an artistic element to cooking, but most things are like that. You can take an excel spreadsheet and use an artist element to make it more pleasing to the user.
That artisitc element doesn’t, in of itself, make it an art
So who are these chefs who create dishes that not only taste good but offer original, meaningful insights into the human condition?
My wife’s cooking represents “Mans Inhumanity To Man”
I am so glad she doesn’t read the SDMB.
Those whose dinners have changed MY human condition in an esoteric and enlightening sense (YMMV):
Jeremy Fox - (My personal favorite who, sadly, is not currently cooking anywhere but consulting. At the time, he was at Ubuntu in Napa, California)
David Kinch - Manresa; Los Gatos, California
Daniel Patterson - Coi; San Francisco, California
José Andres - The Bazaar; Los Angeles, California
Daniel Boulud - Boulud; Las Vegas, Nevada (now closed, but he is still cooking in New York)
Daniel Hollingsworth - French Laundry; Yountville, California
Hiro Urasawa - Urasawa; Los Angeles, California
Tom Kitchin - The Kitchin; Edinburgh, Scotland
Nicholaus Balla - Nombe; San Francisco, California
Jean-Georges Vongerichten - Jean-Georges; New York, New York
Sean Brock - McCrady’s; Charleston, South Carolina
Stephen Williams - Harwood Arms; London, England
Thomas Keller - French Laundry; Yountville, California
Kaz Oyama - Totoraku; Los Angeles, California
The more it is Art and the less it is Craft, the less interested I am in eating it.
Why?
The Craft of cooking is making the dish taste good, The Art is the visual presentation.
Some chefs wind up making incredible looking food that is a letdown on the taste.