Of Fruit, Frippery, Art & Artifice
A Necklace Made of Figs? A Doughnut as a Crown?
In early June, the photographer Melanie Dunea mounted an exhibition of her latest project titled Amuse-Bouche. It builds on her previous series, Don’t Play with Your Food and her ongoing exploration of food as a medium or material, and subject. The images immediately catch the eye. Then, they get the mind working. Melanie meant them to be provocative, but she doesn’t tell us how to read them. They are here to amuse, arouse, and to start conversations. It’s like Stella Bugbee wrote in her recent review of Marc Jacobs’ SS 26 show at the New York Public Library: “One gets the sense that, like an artist, Mr. Jacobs is as interested in what the audience sees in his work as anything he may have intended. He provides the dream, we are left to do the interpretation.” Here’s what Melanie’s dream brought up for me, scattershot style:
• A few months ago, I got a sneak peek of the images when Melanie, who’s my close friend, was figuring out how she might present them in a book. They inserted themselves into an ongoing dialogue about the interplay of food and fashion and how those two pop cultural genres have informed and interacted with each other. Because, yes, over the last 30 years, as food became a viable form of entertainment and profitable fodder for advertisers, it joined the ranks of pop cultural categories among which art, film, television, literature, theater, dance, music et bien sur, fashion, were already counted and, subsequently, got enmeshed in the constant cross-pollination between them. Food being something of the new kid on the block, and maybe the most accessible, its increasing popularity has rendered it the current darling for most of its counterparts.
A recent smattering: Carsten Höller’s Brutalisten “installation,” which I remain obsessed with from afar. Bradley Cooper’s movie called Burnt (2015) about a bad boy chef, followed, ten years later, by the actor’s opening a cheesesteak shop in New York City (and let’s not forget the more recent cinematic culinary flicks The Menu of 2022 or last year’s The Taste of Things). The Bear (no qualification required) or newcomer Carême, a contemporary reimagining of the life of the world’s first celebrity chef. C. Pam Zhang’s deeply disturbing dystopian (and highly recommended) novel Land of Milk of Honey (2023). Lynn Nottage’s dramedy “Clyde’s” about a group of formerly incarcerated characters who work at a sandwich shop (loved it). Then there’s Benson Boone and his collab with Crumbl, which was covered by the New York Times STYLE section (not Arts; not Food). Dance, I can’t say I’ve seen an example of, but fashion’s having quite the gastronomical outburst with Tiffany & Co.’s Blue Box Café, Louis Vuitton’s Le Café, Armani’s new restaurant (the first one closed in 2020), and Prada’s pending SoHo café that may or may not be an outpost of the 19th-Century pastry shop the company took over in Milan. Printemps, the legendary Parisian department store that opened a superluxe, jewel-box shop in Fi-Di has not one but FIVE different food and beverage venues within its ornately, fantastically decorated walls. (And, perhaps, its own, forthcoming, limited edition passion fruit chocolate bar.) Oh, and as of last week, Glossier has teamed up with Magnolia Bakery to give us all what we’ve been waiting for: banana pudding-flavored lip balm.
• Something else Melanie’s images reference: The many parallels between food and fashion in terms of environmental and economic impact. So much waste. So much disregard for labor. So much compulsive drive to buy—to wear, to dine. It’s amazing, the proportional relationship between Americans’ capitalist-fueled psychosocial insecurity to keep up materially and the simultaneous resource insecurity in our own country and around the world.
We’re so far beyond “Let them eat cake.” We’re too busy watching Dakota Johnson and Chris Evans make pizza, Seth Meyers give us restaurant recs, or Drew Barrymore eat mac & cheese out of a plastic handbag to deal with starving children. We might as well be festooning ourselves in figs or supping on silken corsets. The inherent functionality of food (for energy and nutrients) and clothing (protection against the elements) has been all but forgotten. Instead, we justify our eternally unfulfilling overconsumption and avoidance of vital truths with a steady course of self-medication, one dose—purchase (or binge)—at a time, under the banner of self-care.
When I looked past the fun, clever, well-composed, attention-grabbing surface of Melanie’s photos, I saw a message about frivolity in the face of famine. You can read her series as a source of both delight and of warning, or even reprimand; it forces you to confront the constant tension between fleeting pleasure and the underlying awareness of its harmful costs.
• There’s a comparable tension in the conversation Melanie’s series sparks about art and luxury. Is art a luxury? Or is it just luxury? The act of ascribing a singular meaning to “art” has always been fraught, but I’m having a hard time with “luxury” too, these days. I used to think of it as less accessible—or even, inaccessible—by definition, either because it existed in such limited quantities or because it was cost prohibitive. But now we have everyone going on about “accessible luxury,” so that’s confusing.
Either way, it’s impossible to separate luxury, as a word or concept, from “the luxury market” or “lifestyle” branding. Similarly, whether it’s sold at a gallery, owned by a museum, or part of a private collection, art’s value is determined by the conditions the commodity market imposes. In terms of how we perceive it, it’s a lot like haute couture. When you see those dresses coming down the runway, you can’t believe anyone would wear them “in real life” or if that’s the point. People collect them. Like art. Also like (most) art, they’re prized for the technical skill and creativity or originality they require (and display). And they are usually one-of-a-kind or one of few.
Luxury implicates waste; the relationship between how much goes into the making (and purchasing) of a couture gown to how much use it gets (if at all) is inherently imbalanced. And even though some of us believe art does have a real, practical purpose (raises hand), it’s not fulfilling an essential physical need like shelter, clothing, or food. In Amuse-Bouche, the latter is at the crux of this dilemma—or provocation—and brings it to light. Food has become a luxury, and not just in the sense that people are starving, but because—take fine dining, the branded cakes at the Louis Vuitton café, edible gold—it’s become part of the high end of the lifestyle racket. (Related: if you haven’t noticed, bakeries are now frequently talked about as the “accessible” version of restaurants.)
Melanie pushes that extravagance to its furthest conclusion with her process: it took hours and painstaking handiwork to lay the dried citrus out in the right pattern to fashion a skirt and bandeau and mold it to the body of the model—and stay put. Not so different from the delicate, precise stitching, cutting and fitting done at a couture atelier.1
Unlike a cloth garment, the shelf-life of produce is short, and these “outfits” can’t be “worn” outside the photography studio; the materials will inevitably go to waste. But the photo becomes an index of their making and captures their fleetingness. Hand-printed on archival paper, like textile objects, so long as they’re properly cared for, they will last. Even though the images are reproducible, the process of printing them ensures that no two will ever be the same. She published a limited edition of books as well—a red and a pink, 250 each. They are cloth-covered, their bindings, hand-stitched and Swiss-bound (in America), which is a somewhat arcane method in 2025; the idea is for them to look like a menu you might find at a 50 Best Restaurant. Personally, I’d rather have one of those than a souvenir from a prestige restaurant meal. But that’s just me.
• The same week Melanie’s exhibit opened, the New York Times published an article written by Pete Wells about how chefs are using ChatGPT in their kitchens. It didn’t sell me on AI, although I’m sure others were gung-ho about the whole thing. What stood out was that most prominently featured chefs was one of the major—and cocky (or, if you prefer, superior and self-serious) proponents of molecular gastronomy, and most of the others cited seemed as though they might be cut from the same cloth. Maybe it was that they were so eager to discuss their respective rapports with AI, as if it made their work more interesting or relevant.2 There was only one woman quoted in the piece, and it was Dominique Crenn, which was telling (and not necessarily in a gendered sense): Crenn has always endorsed modernist techniques but not as the defining factor or selling point of her cooking. She’s always deployed it in service of getting the best bite and conveying whatever emotion she prioritizes when she conceives of a dish. This distinguished her from her contemporaries who made their fancy tools into signifiers of innovation and promoted themselves accordingly, as masters of the future gastronomical universe. Now that “molecular gastronomy” has become passé, they’re onto the next new, hot technology of choice. Crenn told Wells she had no interest in AI and believes it doesn’t belong in cooking. I’m not surprised.
That story was fresh in my mind when I walked into Melanie’s show. It was the first time I’d beheld the photos at the scale intended and I had an additional read: I saw them as a kind of trompe l’oeil, as art that could be mistaken for AI-generated work, unless you looked at them more closely and maybe knew a bit about how shots are composed.
In my grad school days, I spent a lot of time looking at images—and describing them, which I initially found silly but later came to realize was vital to critical work and to my writing in general. After that, in my earlier editorial days, I produced the kinds of stories that required somewhat elaborate photo shoots—of products, or peoples’ homes. And then, because I wrote two cookbooks, I had the privilege of experiencing the photo side of that (the best part of cookbooking, IMO). The takeaway from all of this is that when I look at Amuse-Bouche I see how the radicchio of a woman’s skirt hangs in a way that must be physically manipulated but is also actually possible for those leaves to hang. If you scrutinize a photo generated by AI, there’s usually something not quite right, a kind of flatness, or unnaturalness to how the objects or components are positioned; the shadows and edges of things will look off.
Melanie told me she’s found it disappointing—and insulting—that people assume her work is the result of her relying on algorithmically informed tech. I don’t blame her. But I also think the timeliness of this series—its arrival simultaneous to our collective, sweeping preoccupation with AI—makes Amuse-Bouche feel somehow more important. Like it captures what we’ll look back on that moment when we could still discern a human-made work of art from a solely tech-produced one.
AI will “learn” from Melanie’s photos. It becomes “smarter” the more information it gets from us. From what I gather, it’s a homogenizing replica of average human intelligence. It’s already well on its way to making our historical narratives, our images, our art—and most dangerously, our thinking more uniform.
I hate this.
So please, when you look at her necklaces strung with blueberries and pomegranate seeds, or grapes and husk cherries, or at the Dippin’ Dots ticker turned into a Wonder Woman-like ensemble, remember that human hands are responsible for the artifice in front of you, not a bot. 🤖
The prints are for sale directly from the artist. They are limited edition and come with a certificate of authenticity.
All photographs are hand-signed and printed on archival Hahnemuhle Photo Rag Baryta Paper. Custom sizes are available and the price varies according to print size.
It should be noted that Melanie selected a team of technicians to apply their own skills (and hands) to the work—fashion stylist, Robert Molhar and food stylists, Romilly Newmann and Ethan Lunkenheimer.
I can imagine a future where someone like Thomas Keller or Daniel Humm brands a culinary-specific AI product. Can you?