When Horror Tastes Good

Food and wine have to taste good. If they do not, we push the plate away and leave the glass unfinished. We are cautious about what we put in our mouths; there is no safe distance when you ingest something. You can stand in front of a disturbing painting. You can listen to harsh music for the rush of it. But you will not swallow what strikes you as disgusting or dangerous. Your body refuses.

This fact is often used to cast doubt on whether food or wine can count as genuine form of art. The argument usually runs like this. The canonical fine arts—painting, sculpture, music, literature—are not constrained in this way. A painting can depict a massacre; a novel can dwell on cruelty or grief; a piece of music can be abrasive or chaotic. We still seek them out. The unpleasant content does not stop us because we keep it at arm’s length. We see it, imagine it, think it through, but we do not ingest it.

Consider the standard examples. Picasso’s Guernica, with its fractured, screaming bodies. Kathe Kollwitz’s desolate, hollowed-out figures. Munch’s The Scream is a distilled image of anxiety. None of these works are pretty in any conventional sense. They stage horror, despair, and anguish. Yet people line up to look at them and leave feeling enlarged rather than damaged. Music gives us similar cases. We listen to the jolting rhythms and dense clusters in Stravinsky or the jagged, dissonant guitar work of a band like black midi and feel alive, not poisoned.

Now consider a plate of confit du canard and a glass of Burgundy. The duck has to be delicious or it will sit there, congealing on the plate. The wine must be at least minimally pleasurable—balanced enough, expressive enough—or it will be abandoned after a sip or two. In a restaurant no one orders “anxious duck” with a side of “despairing Pinot Noir.”  From this contrast, many critics conclude that food and wine lack the expressive range of painting, music, or literature. Whatever they communicate, they must do so under the constraint of gustatory pleasure. They supposedly cannot present the ugly, since the ugly will not be eaten or drunk.

I think this argument goes wrong because it misses something important about our appreciation of art. When a painting or a piece of music presents something unpleasant, you do not in fact have an unpleasant experience in the straightforward sense. You are, in most circumstance,  not reliving bombing raids in front of Guernica. You are not literally being shredded by guitar feedback. You are enjoying the work. You take pleasure in the way it is made, in the intensity, clarity, and formal invention. The subject might be tragic or violent, but the experience of the artwork itself is vivid, absorbing, sometimes even joyful despite the difficulty of the subject matter..

If that weren’t true, great art would simply repel us. We would avert our eyes, cover our ears, and walk away. When we say a work of art moves us, that response always includes some kind of pleasure in the expression, in the way the artist has shaped and framed difficult material. Take that away and what remains is not art; it is just an unpleasant event.

Art that gives no pleasure at all is simply a failed work.

On this point, fine art on the wall and the fine food and wine on the table are not different. Pleasure is not an optional extra. It is a condition of success. A plate or a glass that gives no pleasure fails, just as a painting that only nauseates you fails.

There is another mistake built into the standard objection. It is simply not true that food cannot represent violence or horror. Think of a whole fish served on a platter. The skin is intact, the bones are present, one eye still staring dully from the socket. You are looking at a corpse. That image carries with it ideas of death, slaughter, power, the creative destruction of heat and fire, maybe even the violence of the fishing industry. None of that disappears just because the seasoning is deft.

What changes is how you receive it. The chef’s skill together with your own readiness to bracket what you are seeing, all of that pulls the scene into a different light. You let the violence be reframed. You tell yourself a story about tradition, craft, and terroir. You accept the pairing of that fish with an incisive, mineral white wine that itself suggests stones, salt, and something faintly feral. Through a mix of culinary artistry and a bit of self-deception, you allow the whole ensemble to become a source of pleasure and meaning instead of horror.

As it is with food and wine, so it is with art. Both can circle around death, fear, and loss. Both rely on form and craft to make something shareable out of what would otherwise be unbearable. And in both domains, if there is no pleasure at all in the encounter, you simply turn away.