Denmark’s culture minister announced a new initiative on Friday that aims to officially acknowledge gastronomy as a fine art. If it is successful, it will be the first time a nation has legally classified cooking — or at least some versions of it — as a form of cultural production worthy of the same support and protection as painting or ballet.
Still in its exploratory phase, the initiative will begin by convening experts to consider a reclassification of gastronomy from craft to art, a change that would eventually require parliamentary approval. If passed, it would make the industry’s highest-level chefs eligible for state subsidies and funding from private foundations that support the arts.
“Hopefully, it will allow gastronomy to be considered not just nourishment but a form of expression,” the minister Jakob Engel-Schmidt said in an interview after announcing the move at Convergence, a symposium for chefs, in Copenhagen.
Denmark once subsisted on herring and rye bread, but in recent decades has become a premier dining destination thanks to the groundbreaking New Nordic cuisine spearheaded by the chef René Redzepi at his Noma restaurant. The initiative, Engel-Schmidt said, is a way to maintain the country’s position on the culinary cutting edge.
Although cooking is often referred to as “the culinary arts” in France and UNESCO has granted cultural heritage status to Italian cuisine, neither of these designations officially equates chefs’ work with that of sculptors or conductors.
Rasmus Munk, whose avant-garde restaurant Alchemist in Copenhagen organized the symposium, said that support could give chefs time and space to develop their creativity. Restaurants “have to focus on operations all the time,” Munk said. “That’s where I get jealous of other artistic fields. Musicians don’t have to write their new album while they are onstage performing.”
He said the artistic designation would also more accurately describe the kind of creative work in which some chefs engage. At Alchemist, dinner takes place beneath a planetarium-style dome illuminated with evocative video installations, and includes thought-provoking dishes like a grilled cod jaw wrapped in a translucent dehydrated cod skin that resembles plastic and is meant as a comment on ocean pollution.
Other fine-dining chefs like Massimo Bottura in Modena, Italy; Rodolfo Guzman in Santiago, Chile; and Dominique Crenn in San Francisco also engage in what they have identified as artistic practices. But many within the profession remain reluctant to embrace the label for a profession that relies on both the precise reproduction of dishes and on paying customers who consume the chef’s work.
Some of the field’s greatest names — like Joël Robuchon, who died in 2018, and Thomas Keller — have insisted that they are craftspeople who emphasize technique and skill, not artists seeking to express an idea or evoke an emotion. “Cooking and art share many tools — emotion, intention, experience,” Aitor Zabala, the chef at the innovative Los Angeles restaurant Somni, said in an email. “But I struggle to see myself that way. I’ve never worked with the idea of ‘making art’ in mind.”
The art world has also been divided on the question. Visual and performance artists like the early-20th-century Italian Futurists and the contemporary artist Rirkrit Tiravanija have used food as a medium in their work. But when the prestigious international art exhibition Documenta invited Ferran Adrià, the chef at the famously boundary-pushing elBulli restaurant in Spain, to participate in the 2007 edition, the decision stirred controversy. The Australian art critic Robert Hughes, for one, slammed the chef’s inclusion as a sign of the banalization of art.
Ruth Noack, who curated that edition of Documenta, said this week that the invitation was based less on a desire to expand the notion of art than to reflect on what one practitioner was doing. “At the time, Ferran was making food that was transgressing the border of what we can with our senses comfortably ingest,” Noack said.
He was also reflecting seriously on every aspect of the dining experience, she added. “Ferran had an artistic practice,” Noack said, “an approach that led him to push his materials and processes to the limit, while also self-analyzing and documenting his own processes.”
Mathias Kryger, a curator who is also an art critic for the Danish newspaper Politiken, is skeptical of the culture minister’s plans. “Of course you can have artists working actively in gastronomy, using food as a material, but that is not the same as a chef making food for people to eat,” he said. “Art exists within a framework of critical thinking and art historical knowledge.”
The new plan may also get pushback from the Danish art world if it means greater competition for funding.
The painter Maria Torp said she supported the plan in principle, since it would help chefs with “the wish and the expertise to raise food to new heights” develop new ideas. But if that support takes money from more established categories of art, she added, “I would have to see the numbers.”
The Danish chef Nicolai Norregaard said the new initiative recognized something that he has observed in his own restaurant, Kadeau. Food elevated by the chef can “move people or transport them to another dimension,” he said. “Just like when I go to a museum and see a painting that fills me up with the sense of something bigger than myself.”
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