Feast as performance art

Interesting read in the NY Times about how the art set celebrate the holidays.

Agathe Snow is an artist whose latest work looks like a pile of dumpster refuse that serves as a comment on... well... whatever. More interesting to me is that she's apparently a good cook and invited her artist-friends to pig out for an event she dubbed the Fist Postapocalyptic Christmas Dinner.

First, the visual: in the entryway, an installation of jarred potions, oils and jams. Off-kilter cookies tumbled out of a Joseph Beuys-worthy suitcase. In the main room, a table fashioned from upended bookshelves was covered end to end with food in mismatched pots, pans and trays, while an explosive centerpiece assemblage underscored the evening’s the-end-was-near theme. Every few minutes, another riotously garnished dish appeared: goose stuffed with kale, a glossy ham, Campari-cranberry relish, green eggs, a terrine of chicken-liver pâté, poussin with garlic and pears, roast quail, empanadas, leg of lamb, a tray of beef shanks . . . wild rice with pomegranate, lentils, sweet-potato purée, cauliflower-eggplant gratin . . . rough-hewn breads. The volume of food became a performance in itself.

Sounds like an orgy of consumption. Given the fact allusion to the apocolypse in the title of the event, you'd imagine something a bit more stark, bleak and far less decadent. The apocolypse? Party on, apparently.