Can someone explain art?
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- Published on Tuesday, 06 March 2012 06:12
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February Dinner
The pictures enclosed are of the first Tuesday night dinner of the year. The menu was as listed:
Seared scallop over poached mushroom
Grilled polenta
Mushroom veal demi-glace
Celeriac soup
Crouton of celery and locatelli
Belgian endive
Crab and oranges
Tenderloin of veal
Leeks and oysters
Zucchini, cauliflower, butternut squash
Pear frangipane
Crème englais
The menu and the progression of the courses was a success. I say that because sometimes when you envision something and then try to execute it, things do not work out as you had hoped. That was not the case this Tuesday and as the menu worked as well as I had hoped. There are parameters that you work with as far as your basic flavors and textures combined with portion size and theme that make a menu interesting or a flop. A flop can happen when one has no regard for the fundamentals and takes too many chances, or simply assumes something will be good only because it is different. For a celebration of the menu "clicking" as Elvi and I like to say, we had a nice dinner of the leftovers here at the house the next night. During the course of the dinner Elvi was planning her garden for next year and the subject of tomato cages came up and we needed to do some mathematical formulations to determine how much wire we needed to build the cages.
Out came the high school geometry and algebra books and after an hour of scrap paper and questioning each others intelligence we had an answer. This made us both realize how much information one is capable of forgetting in their life, and how the Greeks had created an empire of knowledge and now they can not even balance a checkbook. That conversation aside, all of the graphs and formulations in these books had me thinking of the things that can be explained and defined through logic and formulas, and how I could possibly explain in more specific terms why some menus work, and why art is such a difficult thing to define. The better art form to examine this question is music. Nothing more than vibrations at different frequencies. All the notes can be transcribed to paper and understood. What then is the reason for some artist to sound better than others? These questions are beyond my capacity to explain. There is however some intrinsic quality to creating something that if anyone has some explanation for.
I would appreciate being educated on the subject. Hope you enjoy these photos,
And please do not be shy with at least an opinion, being wrong is not the worst thing that can happen to you,
Best,
Mike