Is cuisine art? Considering art and craft as conceptual categories in American fine dining

Abstract

Many scholars who examine systems of status in art worlds such as film, fashion, and cuisine, have drawn on the analytical and folk categories of art and craft to explain hierarchy in these sites. As Becker argues, art is used to describe “higher status” products made for creative purposes, while craft is defined first by its function, and creative concerns are secondary. However, as art worlds continue to be defined by innovation, and, in pursuit of that innovation, expanded variety, perhaps these polarized categories of art and craft are not entirely distinct, nor do they represent the same institutionalized hierarchical meanings in all sites of creative work. In this article, I draw on analysis of 1380 restaurant reviews and 120 in-depth interviews with critically celebrated chefs to understand how creative workers use categories of art and craft (and the distinctions between the two categories) to define creative work that exists between the worlds of art and craft. I find that producers differentially interpret the meaning of art and therefore differentially conceptualize their work as art, craft, both, or neither of the categories. I detail the variations in these conceptual interpretations to illuminate the ways in which creative producers define both the categories and the dimensions of belonging by which they determine their work's inclusion in (or exclusion from) a particular category. I find that, contrary to the dominant theories of art and craft, chefs embrace association with both art and craft, often together, suggesting that the traditional status hierarchies that these concepts have symbolized may be shifting and that the concepts themselves may not be mutually exclusive in all creative work.