The Aesthetics of Taste: Eating within the Realm of Art

Front matter

The Aesthetics of Taste: Eating within the Realm of Art

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Contents

List of Figures IX

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The Judgments of Taste: David Hume 16

Introduction

It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not its relations to the world, not even its right to exist.

THEODOR W. ADORNO!

Cooking, like art, is both reactive and creative — it is about being in flux, navigating and trusting our senses and then connecting and transforming.

OLAFUR ELIASSON?

The French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre harbored a particular dislike for shellfish, especially for their white bodies that resist being pulled out of their shells and cuirasses. He found prawns, mollusks, oysters, and lobsters thoroughly disgusting, and likened them to insects devoid of consciousness.? When Simone de Beauvoir quizzed him about the details of this aversion, Sartre replied: “When I eat a crustacean, I am eating something that belongs to another world.’4

Erik Satie made the color white a key criterion in his dietary regime. Known for his utter eccentricity, the French composer set out exactly three minutes for lunch (always from 12.11 to 12.14) in his meticulously planned daily schedule, in which dinner, invariably starting at 19.16, took four minutes. Satie never talked during this time for fear of choking to death. His idiosyncrasies governed a range of practicalities in his life. His wardrobe was full of identical brown corduroy suits, which he would wear with a white vest and white tights. His menu selection was equally restrictive and precise. He wrote down in his notes: “I

1 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. and trans. Robert Hullot-Kenter (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 1. https://www.jahic-roethlisberger.ch/artists-recipes-book-launch/ (Access 15 June 2021).

See Michel Onfray, Appetites for Thought: Philosophers and Food, trans. Donald Barry and Stephen Muecke (London: Reaktion Books, 2015), go.

4 Simone de Beauvoir, Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre, trans. Patrick O’Brian (New York: Pantheon

© DOROTA KOCZANOWICZ, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004534933_002 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 license.

eat only white victuals: eggs, sugar, grated bones; the fat of dead animals; veal, salt, coconuts, chicken cooked in white water, fruit mould; rice, turnips; camphorised sausage, pasta, cheese (cream), cotton salad and certain kinds of fish (without skin). I have my wine boiled, and drink it cold with fuchsia juice.” Even if this statement was a component of Satie’s self-fashioning rather than a factual account of his preferences, it is certainly interesting for the choice of the aesthetic axis around which the account of his bill of fare revolved.

Cooking is distinctive to humans. The transformation of the raw into the cooked produced social bonds and culture. The sensation of hunger and the imperative to appease it bind us to other animals, but the manner in which this natural need is met emphatically liberates humans from a dependence on nature. Food Is Culture, as Massimo Montanari, an eminent food historian, proclaims in the title of his book. Montanari goes on to insist that “even nature is culture.” Cooking is the most human of activities. By cooking, we detach ourselves from the natural world and harness nature: "The chemical modifications induced by cooking, and the combination of ingredients, work together to bring to the mouth a food, that, if not completely artificial; is surely 'created.”7 In this insight, Montanari points to a bridge between food and art, prompting the realization that the seeds of art germinate in the fundamental nutritional processes.

Sartre's and Sati's food preferences, in which color serves as the primary criterion of choice, are contrasting and paradoxically similar, speaking to the double entanglement of food in the cultural aspects of human existence. Firstly, food is associated with free choice; secondly, the whimsical pronouncements of connoisseurs bear out the fact that our decisions do not always result from focusing on nutritional values. People's menus are determined by culture and arranged in conformity with ethical, economic, identarian, and aesthetic norms.

While the aesthetic component of food as a rule receives only limited attention, it is becoming increasingly central to contemporary interpretations of broadly conceived culinary practices. That aesthetics, art, and cuisine are becoming aligned is powerfully borne out by our daily consumer choices (e.g., we only buy nice-looking, shapely vegetables, and we are ready to pay a lot in restaurants which put a premium on food presentation) and by the

5 Erik Satie, A Mammal's Notebook: The Writings of Erik Satie, ed. Ornella Volta, trans. Antony Melville (London: Atlas Press, 2017), 112.

6 Massimo Montanari, Food Is Culture, trans. Albert Sonnenfeld (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 9.

inclusion of foodstuffs and cooking techniques in artistic practices (Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Gordon Matta-Clark, Daniel Spoerri, Peter Kubelka, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Elżbieta Jabłońska, Alison Knowles, Anna Królikiewicz, and others). The reduction of the distance between life and art found its most spectacular exemplification in the 2007 invitation for the chef Ferran Adria to take part in Documenta Kassel, one of the leading art events in the world, on an equal footing with the other artists.3

In this book, I consider whether and, if so, on what terms food can be considered a form of art. The transformations in culture which fueled the tendencies mentioned above have by no means brought disputes around the aesthetic status of food to an end. The findings of Carolyn Korsmeyer, a distinguished contemporary theorist of taste, highlight the relevance of the sense of taste, which, she claims, can and should be philosophically explored. Korsmeyer recognizes the aesthetic qualities of culinary practices. Nonetheless, as she embraces the traditional approach to fine arts, which insists on the disinterestedness of art, she rules out the possibility of elevating food to the rank of art. Theodor Adorno explains that “[t]he definition of art is at every point indicated by what art once was, but it is legitimated only by what art became with regard to what it wants to, and perhaps can, become.”? Adorno's idea of openness to what the future brings is shared by pragmatists, who — unlike Korsmeyer — do not seek to confront the aesthetic uniqueness of food with the classical definitions of art as detached beauty. Hence, pragmatism is the most promising framework within which to capture and describe the relationships between culinary and artistic practices. Within pragmatism itself, Richard Shusterman’s somaesthetics proves the most suitable approach for the study of the intersections of food and art, since the new philosophical discipline founded by Shusterman draws on the original notion of aesthetics as defined by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in order to “redirect aesthetics back to the core issues of perception, consciousness, and feeling.”!° With the body at the center of its attention, somaesthetics “resists the traditional aesthetic attitude of distanced, disinterested contemplation by advocating an aesthetics of active, creative engagement.”

The pragmatist perspective entirely recasts the appraisal of relations between art and life. Pragmatism’s Darwinian leanings result in conceiving

8 For Adria’s visit to Kassel, see Food for Thought, Thought for Food, ed. Richard Hamilton and Vicente Todoli (Barcelona and New York: Actar, 2009).

9 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 3.

10 Richard Shusterman, Thinking through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 3.

culture as another mode of adaptation to the environment. As an effect, the question whether food is art takes on a different meaning. Pragmatists incorporate everyday experience into the realm of art, even though they insist that a strictly aesthetic experience is something exceptional. In this framework, art is comprehended as an outcome of efforts to transform nature:

Experience is not different from nature; rather, it is nature — one of its multiple forms. [...] in the pulsating rhythm of life, harmony — between the energies of an organism and the energies of its environment — becomes the germ of the aesthetic quality of experience. When order is re-established, participation in this newly instituted order comes to figure as fulfillment, a state approximating aesthetic experiences. For this reason, every common everyday experience may morph into an aesthetic experience.!

Given this, pragmatism offers a suitable lens through which to scrutinize debates on the relationship between food and art. This lens effectively helps us inspect activities involving food for elements of experience which appear both in the processes of cooking and in artistic pursuits, and thus it warrants the comparison of culinary experience to aesthetic experience.

Briefly, the choice of pragmatism — and, in particular, of somaesthetics — as the primary theoretical framework for my book is driven by at least two important reasons. Essentially, somaesthetics grew from the subsoil of thinking opposed to the still influential philosophical positions proposed by Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, in which food is marginalized. As Shusterman explains:

As pragmatist aesthetics rejects the essential Kantian opposition of the aesthetic to the practical by insisting that art and aesthetic experience can serve life’s interests without losing their status as worthy ends, so it also opposes Hegel's idealist scientism by celebrating the value of immediate enjoyment and of the body as a central locus where life's interests, pleasures, and practical purposes are realized."3

Hence, somaesthetics is a convenient analytical instrument for depicting and interpreting phenomena of everyday life, including culinary practices.

12 Krystyna Wilkoszewska, “Estetyka pragmatyczna, in Estetyki filozoficzne xx wieku, ed. Krystyna Wilkoszewska (Kraków: Universitas, 2000), 18. Unless indicated otherwise, quotations from non-English texts are provided in the translation of the translator of this volume.

The other reason why somaesthetics underpins my argument is that it is a handy tool for culturologically-driven explorations. Shusterman insists that the cultural context affects all forms of somatic consciousness.!* Somaesthetics thus makes it possible to bring together three ostensibly detached domains: culture, aesthetics, and bodiliness. Food, which in facts belongs in each of these orders, is an obvious point of interest for somaesthetics. Pragmatist aesthetics holds that aesthetic experience forms part of general experience, whereby aesthetics is inextricable from life practice. Krystyna Wilkoszewska asserts that “aesthetics is supposed to start from life experiences, of which aesthetic experiences are both the most sublimated and the most heightened form. As the quintessence of any process of experiencing, these experiences are of exceptional relevance to philosophy.’ Building on these insights, I combine theoretical considerations with explaining how the cultural environment has affected the conclusions of great thinkers who have discussed the aesthetics of food. In doing so, I rely on the pragmatist approach, which guides me beyond purely philosophical explorations and prompts me to engage in culturological investigations into the cultural status of taste and particular aesthetic manifestations of food in culture. The culturological perspective is especially pronounced in interpreting the enmeshment of culinary practices in evaluative processes. The specific compass of this perspective is often demarcated by the interests of the artists I study.

Food is complex enough to require the mobilization of a variety of disciplines and discourses; hence, my theoretical argument on taste is underpinned by philosophy, culturology, art sciences, history, sociology, and the anthropology of taste, while also drawing on the articulations of artists. Consequently, this book embraces the interdisciplinarity characteristic of food studies.

The chapter devoted to “The Antinomies of Taste” offers an account of the positions adopted by two great thinkers of the age of taste: Immanuel Kant and David Hume. Their ideas are juxtaposed with the views of Anthelme Brillat- Savarin, who can suitably be called a gastrosopher. In this chapter, I depict the dramatic tension between appetite and aesthetics, which was constitutive of and intrinsic to 18th-century debates on the essence of taste. I dwell on these concepts not only by way of historical introduction; in fact, the notions and assessments formulated back then have ever since formatively affected and organized the prevalent modes of thinking about the relationship between the sense of taste and the realm of its activity (i.e., eating and drinking) in

14 Shusterman, Thinking through the Body, 3. 15 Wilkoszewska, "Estetyka pragmatyczna,” 120.

the context of art. If asked whether food was art, Kant, Hume, and Henry Home would answer in unison that it was not. The intellectual tradition of the West has quite eagerly included taste in philosophical discourses, but only as a metaphor for aesthetic sensitivity. Nevertheless, despite a clear dividing line between corporeal and intellectual pleasures, even Kant’s restrictive philosophy carries the potential to abate the dissonance between aesthetic and gastronomical taste. The two are linked, as Rodolphe Gasché observes, by the subjectivity, immediacy, and sociality of experience.

Though essential to life and culture, food and eating have never really been esteemed by Western philosophers. While food and eating have been brought to bear in philosophical discussions, they have more often than not featured as emphatic examples to illustrate a position on another matter. For instance, when Hume examined the process of induction, he evoked bread to ask whether we could indeed be sure that the bread which fed us one day would do the same the following day as well. In his own take on induction, Bertrand Russell wondered what made us certain that the sun would rise the following morning. To undermine this certainty, he pictured a chicken killed one day by the same person who had fed it every previous day. These examples make Robert Nozick ask whether it is by coincidence that “the problem of induction expresses itself as a worry over loss, of nourishment, of light and warmth, of safety.”16

In the chapter “The Value of Taste: Cultural Hierarchies,” I ponder, among other things, why something as basic and essential as the need for food has so long been deemed unworthy of philosophical attention. This is in fact part of an altogether broader issue, which John Dewey addressed by asking:

Why is the attempt to connect the higher and ideal things of experience with basic vital roots so often regarded as betrayal of their nature and denial of their value? Why is there repulsion when the high achievements of fine art are brought into connection with common life, the life that we share with all living creatures? Why is life thought of as an affair of low appetite, or at its best a thing of gross sensation, and ready to sink from its best to the level of lust and harsh cruelty?!”

Dewey states that answering these questions comprehensively “would involve the writing of a history of morals that would set forth the conditions that have

16 Robert Nozick, The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations (New York, London, Toronto, and Sydney: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 56. 17 John Dewey, Art as Experience (London: Perigee, 2005), 20.

brought about contempt for the body, fear of the senses, and the opposition of flesh to spirit. 18 This work is superbly done by Korsmeyer in Making Sense of Taste. Building on her insights, I reveal the unarticulated mechanisms of evaluation which lie behind the separation of various spheres of culture and behind the normative consequences of this separation. Based on binary oppositions, the intellectual tradition of the West has excluded the body and all things bodily from the sphere of cognition, while at the same time elevating cultural divisions into epistemological dogmas. Yet, as Dewey noticed, “[t]here is no limit to the capacity of immediate sensuous experience to absorb into itself meanings and values that in and of themselves — that is in the abstract — would be designated ‘ideal’ and 'spiritual.”* Culture appoints a place in the hierarchy to food products, culinary techniques, and people who cook. It also institutes an order of the senses in which the bodily senses, among them taste, are less appreciated than the intellectual senses. Korsmeyer identifies an implicit, gender-based value-judgement system which breeds and sustains a male-dominated culture. By becoming aware of the culturally entrenched divisions which produce the stratification of culture and hinder the melioristic attitudes recommended by pragmatist philosophy, we take a step toward abolishing these division.

The chapter “Culinary Experience: A Pragmatist Perspective” is entirely devoted to Dewey. Although the founder of pragmatist aesthetics is not generally associated with food studies, reflections on the cooking and sharing of food and on gastronomical experience repeatedly surface in his writings. I believe Dewey is an important voice to heed when exploring the aesthetics of food because of the comprehensive and visionary quality of his theory, properties perfectly encapsulated in his statement that “[a] conception of fine art that sets out from its connection with discovered qualities of ordinary experience will be able to indicate the factors and forces that favor the normal development of common human activities into matters of artistic value.”20

The interrelations of food, culture, and aesthetics in Dewey’s writings can be investigated from two perspectives. One of them derives from Dewey’s theory of education, which was developed and practiced by a school he set up in Chicago. Dewey was a believer in the utility of incorporating the eating and sharing of food into the educational process. The other analytical perspective arises from Dewey’s aesthetic writings. The passages on culinary practices in

18 Dewey, Art as Experience, 20. 19 Dewey, Art as Experience, 29. 20 Dewey, Art as Experience, 10.

Art as Experience are particularly illuminating in this respect. Dewey's philosophical inquiries are often illustrated with examples borrowed from gastronomy, which serve as models of his central aesthetic concepts.

In order to capture gastronomical experience from a pragmatist perspective, I examine the contexts in which culinary examples appear and their implications for Dewey's concept of experience and for his perception of the status and function of food-related practices in culture. Dewey sets apart aesthetic experience and turns it into a model for all other experiences. Aesthetic qualities confer closure on experience and attest to its value. So even if Dewey did not classify food as, strictly speaking, art, he would certainly claim that it made sense to seek to convert eating into art in order to benefit from it as much as possible.

Discussions about the aesthetic value of food usually focus on dish presentation. Quite a different, ingenious, and surprising perspective is developed by Richard Shusterman, the protagonist of the next chapter, entitled “Somaesthetics and the Art of Eating.” Shusterman proposes a somaesthetic study of the internal and external choreography of eating, which he explicitly identifies with art. He believes that the art of eating is a performative movement-based art rooted in the body of an eater and in the collaboration of people gathered at the table, whose bodies add up to a collective choreography. Movement and the ordering rhythm are also brought in by the sequencing of foods and drinks, such as within a meal (typical dinners consisting of starters, soups, mains, and desserts), over the day (breakfast, lunch, and dinner), and across the calendar with its seasons and festivities (e.g., birthday cakes, New Year's Eve champagne, or seasonal fruit and vegetables).

Shusterman is a rare philosopher who puts the body at the center of his investigations. He refers to his field as somaesthetics, and defines it as reflection on the acting, intelligent, perceptive, and sentient body. The aesthetic dimension of nutritional practices naturally forms a part of his philosophical project. Somaesthetics is a discipline which “is interested not merely in describing our culturally shaped forms of somatic consciousness and modes of somatic practice, but also in improving them”?! This is precisely the goal that Shusterman set for himself in his paper on the art of eating. Since any carefully composed and properly consumed meal may become a component of creative self-fashioning, Shusterman attends to the pleasures of the table, as well as to the problems resulting from our lack of mindfulness and our failure to feed ourselves in harmony with the needs of our bodies.

In somaesthetics, the axial individual dimension intersects with the common good. Various people's compulsions and preferences meet at the table and must be taken into account by a sensitive diner. Shusterman deliberately does not delve into cooking as an artistic pursuit. The sole focus of his approach is on the art of eating as a practice of savoring, whereby how the meals actually come into being is irrelevant. As a result, his framework excludes the site where work goes on in order to enable eaters to concentrate on the pleasures of the mindful ingestion of foods. I believe, however, that it is important to have a glimpse behind the scenes of any sumptuous feast and any modest meal by peeking into the kitchen. The physical and symbolic facets of this territory are explored in the chapter “Kitchen: A World Next Door.” More than just a point in timespace, the kitchen is crucially a “place” with its emotional, social, and cultural load and coloring.?? The acuteness of being may always flare up in everyday activities performed in the kitchen; equally powerful may also be an impulse to run away from all the humble chores of peeling, chopping, mixing liquids which tend to stick, and the time-consuming frying of meat chunks for stews. The memory of these pleasures and vexations is a sturdy part of family stories told and retold time and again, but it is even more permanently stored in our bodies. They also showcase the potential for creativity actualized by homemakers.

This is comprehensively studied by the sociologist Luce Giard, who herself long resisted “feminine” tasks, among which cooking seemed particularly onerous to her. With time, however, she realized that the problem lay in the position accorded to cooking by culture, rather than in cooking as such, and she made it her job to expose the mechanisms of cultural differentiation and to cast a proper light on cooking. Giard effectively interrogates the ingrained patterns of value-judgment and shows that cooking — an alchemical transformation of simple ingredients into a new, complex whole — is an extremely important and complicated matter which requires the combining of skills from various spheres. We tend to take many everyday activities for granted and forget that we are culturally wired to consider them natural. The association of woman with the kitchen represents one such entrenched pattern of thought. I discuss the challenges and opportunities of opposing the verdicts of culture by resorting to art. I believe that Dewey had a point when he appreciated the epistemic potential of art, stating that “the work of art has a unique quality, but that it is that of clarifying and concentrating meanings contained in scattered and weakened ways in the material of other experiences.’”3 Making my case,

22 Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place- World (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2009). 23 Dewey, Art as Experience, 87.

I build on the projects of four performance artists: Marina Abramović, Elżbieta Jabłońska, Martha Rosler, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles in order to depict the dual character of the kitchen, which is a “world apart” and, at the same time, “the heart of the home.” This chapter also has a fifth protagonist, specifically, Margarete Schiitte-Lihotzky, the designer of the Frankfurt Kitchen, standing for the synonym of a modern kitchen-as-a-laboratory, which revolutionized the space of women's work at the beginning of the 2oth century.

Culture transforms bodily habits anchored in social values. Another goal of mine is to examine in-depth how food both establishes and alters communities and how culinary culture unites and separates people. These issues are the main thematic concerns of the chapter entitled “Community around the Table.” Rirkrit Tiravanija is among the most celebrated contemporary artists who have made the collective cooking and eating of meals an element of their artistic practices. At the same time, he is capable of “giving form to thoughts and bringing forth novel exposition modes founded on relationships among people.”2+

Cooking is highly contextual. It ties in with local cultures, environments, products, seasons of the year, etc. At the same time, the sharing of food invariably has a universal dimension to it and, as such, may become a platform for understanding, Tiravanija relies on food and hospitality to remodel conventional ways of thinking, to unplug communication channels, and to encourage the establishment of new relations and sustaining existing ones. Similar standpoints are espoused by Anna Królikiewicz and Marije Vogelzang. The works of these three artists, which are the cornerstones of my argument in “Community around the Table,” all avail themselves of ephemeral artistic practices which seek to build community through food-sharing. While such communities may prove incidental and contingent, the power of these artistic acts should not be ignored because, as Shusterman asserts, “even if experience [...] is only an elusive, ephemeral surface reality, it still exists as a real force that influences other realities deemed deeper and more permanent in shaping that experiential surface.”25

The chapter “The Taste of Authenticity” continues to investigate the consequences of the cultural entanglements of taste. Unlike the preceding chapter, designed to depict the cultural, community-fostering embedment of culinary practices, this chapter interprets the situation, both singular and common in the globalized world, where a tourist wishes to enter the culture of her

24 Nicolas Bourriaud, “Nietrwale zespolenia. Szlakiem teoretycznym od relacyjnego do ‘wedrujacego. Wstęp do wydania polskiego,” in Estetyka relacyjna (Relational Aesthetics), trans. Łukasz Białkowski (Kraków: Mocak, 2012), 20.

25 Richard Shusterman, “Pierre Bourdieu and Pragmatist Aesthetics: Between Practice and Experience,” New Literary History 46, no. 3 (June 2015): 454.

destination though tasting the local foods. Is it possible to become part of the local community when on holiday? Drawing on theoretical studies and artworks, I examine the (im)possibilities of the tourist’s authentic culinary experience. Transposing the aesthetic concept of “authenticity” onto tourism stirs a range of doubts. The notion of authentic taste, which is so highly prized in contemporary culture, harbors an obvious, irresolvable contradiction. The problem has two sources: 1) authenticity is invariably predicated on a confluence of historical factors and, as such, is subject to change; 2) in contemporary culture, authenticity is a commodity on sale. The stronger the imperative of authenticity, the more difficult it is to meet the requirement of uniqueness and the greater the risk of disappointment. This conundrum can be solved, in my view, through the conscious and active shaping of experience.

Entitled “Leftovers,” the last chapter is special in many ways. It disturbs the coherent narrative of the preceding chapters, in which artistic practices serve as exemplifications of theoretical issues. The final pages of the book are exclusively devoted to Daniel Spoerri, a truly exceptional Swiss artist who initiated eat art in the 1960s. I portray his journey as an artist by recalling my own culinary experience of partaking in a dinner held as a homage to Spoerri in Stuttgart in 2010. Palatal taste rubs elbows with aesthetic taste in Spoerri’s works and in the final part of this book’s narrative. Following the sequential logic of the courses masterfully cooked by Vincent Klink, an excellent chef in Wielandshóhe, I explore the meanings of artistic practices which may be associated with these dishes. Cuisine from all corners of Europe reflected the complex and exceptionally creative biography of Spoerri, who was a restaurateur, a chef, and a gallery owner, among other things. Whatever position he has held and whatever job he has done, he has remained first and foremost an artist dedicated to transforming his surroundings into a space of art.

My argument in this book highlights the dual and often self-contradictory nature of culinary practices, in which the physiological need for food is interlocked with culturally conditioned desires. I seek to illuminate the complexity of activities involved in the cooking and sharing of food as a cultural phenomenon. As a matter of fact, I believe that we are witnessing the emergence of a new sensorium in which the bodily senses are assigned a novel and more distinguished position. At the same time, the robust processes of the aestheticization of taste are bringing culinary culture and art ever closer together. I examine these developments in more detail in the “Conclusion.”

The publication of this book was made possible by a grant from the National Programme for the Development of Humanities, funded by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education (No 21H 20 0050 88).

This book was several years in the making. Over this time, I met many people who supported and inspired me. I am particularly grateful to Richard Shusterman for his stimulating influence and unfailing good will. I gratefully acknowledge the helpful interactions I experienced with Carolyn Korsmeyer, Nicola Perullo, Renata Tańczuk, Krystyna Wilkoszewska, Dorota Wolska, and Rafał Włodarczyk, who was one of the first readers of my manuscript and kindly shared his insights with me. Dr. Patrycja Poniatowska contributed to this book as a translator and provided some initial editorial interventions. I use this opportunity to thank her for her helpful comments and commitment. My thank-you also goes to all the pragmatists at the Central European Pragmatist Forum for their motivating support and the sense of grounding they gave me.

I owe a debt of gratitude to the artists who generously allowed me to use the photographs of their works in this book free of charge: Marina Abramović, Elżbieta Jabłońska, Anna Królikiewicz, Martha Rosler, Daniel Spoerri, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Marije Vogelzang; to the Special Collections Research Center of Morris Library at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, which made pictures of the Dewey School available to me; and to William Zachs, who spared no effort to facilitate my access to unique resources on the Scottish Enlightenment. I am grateful to all the publishing houses that allowed the inclusion of previously published excerpts in this book, especially the Wydawnictwo Badan Literackich, the publisher of the book titled Pozycja smaku. Jedzenie w granicach sztuki (2018), which was a significant basis for this book.

I also owe a big thank-you to the institutions that supported my research and the publication of this book: the Department of Cultural Studies, University of Wrocław, and the Faculty of Historical and Pedagogical Sciences, University of Wroclaw.

Last, but not least, my gratitude goes to my husband, Leszek Koczanowicz.

This book includes revisions of papers (or parts of papers) which have been published in journals and collected volumes in English: