When many chefs are better than one

As an art director, I can safely say that a big pet peeve of creatives is to have "design by committee" (our term of endearment for  "too many cooks in the kitchen") or simply and non-metaphorically put, too many opinions and managers in on a project. To my surprise and delight, I found a project where too many chefs can only make this work stronger...

Artist Antoni Miralda and his collaborators are almost halfway through a progressive dinner entitled "Tastes & Tongues / Sabores y Lenguas." Tastes/Sabores is an evolving art work, with photographic, culinary portraits of each city. It's been shown in museums in Caracas and Bogotá, and has been invited to important international art festivals in Latin America, including the Havana Biennial in June. The next festival stop: the Sao Paulo Biennial in October. Other culinary captures include Miami,  Lima,  Mexico City and Havana. Soon it will go to Managua, Santo Domingo, San Juan, Montevideo, Buenos Aires and Barcelona.

In each city, Tastes/Sabores becomes part festival, part imaginary dinner party, with giant tongue-shaped photo collages, a video, and dozens of unique objects created by inhabitants of that city. They document daily examples of how food and creativity mesh.

When asked to explain the art of the exhibit, Miralda sighs: ''It's always difficult, because there is not a product that people can take home as a piece of art. So they take home more a memory, and an image, or an experience.''

Some quotes on Miralda's life works...

"...opens art up to anthropology, finds subjects in local cultural operations, associates comprehensible languages and ritual elements..."
François Burkhardt

"He finds beauty, pathos and humor in what we do to express our values and help ourselves understand passages of time or matters of spirit..."
Philip Yenawine

and my favorite...

"...what should interest us is how Miralda's art has contributed towards shaping both collective memory and shared amnesia. Miralda has more or less consciously -and, indeed, I would say unconsciously- based his work on features of civilization which civilization itself has hypocritically uprooted from 20th century culture. He has brought back to the visual arts some features which were banished from the celebrations and festive events that had been appropriated by the political and economic powers, and have now become part of the language of the authorities. By this I mean rituals of representation which are on the borderline between subversion and alienation, rites that link aspects of individual subjectivity to features of the subconscious mind..."
Bartomeu Mari

Some quotes on Miralda's life works...

"...opens art up to anthropology, finds subjects in local cultural operations, associates comprehensible languages and ritual elements..."
François Burkhardt

"He finds beauty, pathos and humor in what we do to express our values and help ourselves understand passages of time or matters of spirit..."
Philip Yenawine

and my favorite...

"...what should interest us is how Miralda's art has contributed towards shaping both collective memory and shared amnesia. Miralda has more or less consciously -and, indeed, I would say unconsciously- based his work on features of civilization which civilization itself has hypocritically uprooted from 20th century culture. He has brought back to the visual arts some features which were banished from the celebrations and festive events that had been appropriated by the political and economic powers, and have now become part of the language of the authorities. By this I mean rituals of representation which are on the borderline between subversion and alienation, rites that link aspects of individual subjectivity to features of the subconscious mind..."
Bartomeu Mari