Y'know, I added your substack impulsively- I *think* because I liked your comments on DSL- in a "well, why not" spirit. Good to have backup stuff to read, in case I'm bored. Having it in my inbox means I know where to look for it. But it's become one of my favorite things to see there- I just checked my mails, saw I had things from like four substacks, and noticed I was significantly more excited about this one than the others. Just wanted to say well-done!
I think there might be a missing third archetype. What art was.
Craftsmen make an object for the sake of the user.
"Artists" make art for to express themselves.
But when I think of enduring art, I don't think of pieces that seem to have been made merely to fit the whims of a patron nor the artist. Rather, a piece that attempts to express an objective beauty or truth. Art for God, art for art. Never mind the boundaries nor the utility, but what is capital-G Good? Having lost a belief in objectivity, artists mistake being true to themselves (whatever that means) for being Truth.
In the instance of the restaurant, I think real art needs to consider the telos of it. Some slime in a plaster mold is hardly food. A meal can aspire to be more than a workman like plate of pleasant gruel, but conversely doesn't eschew pleasing the eater with a satisfying meal--you aren't then elevating your dish to art, you are losing sight of what you are there to do.
Very good essay. I have had this sort of conversation so many times in a number of contexts, and I keep coming back to the line from Calvin and Hobbes "The problem with being avant-garde is knowing who's is putting on who."
The reviewer expected food, made by a chef, that would do the things food does well: have interesting qualities, take care of hunger, etc. The chef thinks he is innovating cuisine, and if his customers don't like it, it is because they don't get it. Both are wrong. The reviewer for the reasons discussed, but the chef because he is not a chef innovating food for a living. His actual paying audience are the sort of people who want to show other people how elite they are. The type who want to be seen to be at a fancy place, a place so fancy regular people don't understand it. They don't care if they enjoy the food, they merely want to appear to be able to appreciate what lesser folk cannot, and simultaneously not be able to enjoy what the lesser folk do. The food isn't the point; it might as well not even be there.
That is the grift of avant-garde, both the emperor and the peasants have no clothes, but claiming to see beautiful clothing is a sign of being elite. Any pleb can recognize that they are naked.
The risk comes from when one side, the "artist" or the "connoisseur" stops telling the lie, leaving the other party to flounder around, suddenly cast out of the elite and into the plebs who will never accept them.
I think that describes a lot of modern culture, when you get down to it.
the art-craft distinction as only in terms of Avant Garde (innovation) vs conforming to standards (utility), whilst at the same time being of the same class level, in uniquely odd. almost as if "art" is a bit of socially dysfunctional madness incarnate? https://archive.ph/QpDW4https://kirkegaard.substack.com/p/the-verbal-tilt-model
A counter-theory towards this kind of "same average ability, but bias between language vs science", is that the distinction between high art and "porn" (as in "insight porn" and "hustle porn") is a bit blurred, while expert craft's elevation to an art form in-and-of-itself is different from content-esque forms of mass referential media. More references noted here: https://bradnbutter.substack.com/p/porn-martyrs-cyborgs-part-2
Seductive art is packed with gestalt (e.g. mashing words together like an AI), but expert craft is semantically coherent and takes a genius mind to do it. A simple litmus test is to ask "Could Buzzfeed or Five Minute Craft replicate this?" https://thephilosophersmeme.com/2018/03/27/memes-jokes-and-visual-puns/
With software engineering, the most annoying purists are the craftsmen, and the other side is "move fast break things" pragmatists. Which is an entirely different conversation, kinda reminiscent of the explorations of quality in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Given that I'm not a software engineer, this is a blind spot for me. I'm sort of imagining it like this:
1. The purist craftsman wants every line of code documented; he wants everything to adhere with an excruciating level precision to some standard they like. This is usually overkill, and slows everything down, like a swordsmith who demands every sword be absolutely perfect and thus fails (and makes others fail) to outfit an army.
2. The guy who always wants to try new variations of this and that, wants to be fancy, doesn't care about function, thinks people are stepping on his genius.
1-2 are overreaches, and then there's balance guy:
3. Guy who assesses the situation and bends the tools to the best use of the situation, being strict where it provides utility and not allowing himself freedom that will not prove useful.
I tend to think of 3. as a craftsman and 1-2 as kinds of artists, but I'm biased to my own dichotemy/idea so I think I'm probably being a bit unfair by doing so.
One axis is maintainability vs workload. You can do things "the right way" (craftsmen) but it often involves ripping out and reworking huge parts of the system as the requirements change or the inevitable collision with reality shows the original design was bad. Developer time is expensive and the client will hate the very idea of using up more. Alternatively, you can slap a quick fix that'll work, but accumulation of such fixes makes the system a terrible mess that is impossible to understand, reason about and modify further - this process is referred to as accumulating "tech debt", with the implication that at some point you should pay the debt and straighten things out. Most complex projects are somewhere in between, with seasoned projects being a pristine architecture that then got corrupted with increasingly terrible hacks. So, that's balancing long-term vs short-term benefit.
Then you have a tradeoff between elegance/maintainability and function. There are paradigms of software development which make programs really easy to debug and/or not introduce bugs in the first place, but impose a performance overhead. Here the line between artists and craftsmen gets blurred - you can definitely go overboard with it where your solution is super elegant but terrible on every metric, but many people would still call it good craftsmanship because the underlying architecture is neat and easy to modify.
And then you have people who love new shiny things and would like to push them into every project, sometimes referred to as "resume-driven development" (since they can claim they worked on the new shiny thing in their previous job). The new shiny thing probably has cool features that help, but it's also a barely tested mess with an underdeveloped supporting ecosystem. This group has considerable overlap with architecture purists, and pragmatists obviously hate their guts.
The difference between mid-level and senior engineers is largely the ability to decide well on these tradeoffs depending on the problem.
There is a quote from Terry Pratchett: "It was a work of art. It was better than that. It was a work of craft"
I think this captures a lot of this - most of the great works of art were craftsman who had perfected their craft, through repetition, practice, focus etc. Shakespeare, Michelangelo - craftsmen who made a living through their craft
Pratchett himself was a craftsman - the books he wrote were not art, he was a craftsman refining his technique. But they became better than any books written to be art (literary novels etc).
Beautifully written. I've mulled over the distinction between art and craftsmanship many times.
I work in government and at a cursory glance, it is completely justifiable to say that there is very little 'art' involved in the mind-numbing tedium of policy research and strategy (my area of work). But every so often I see my work as an 'artform' primarily due to the amount of implicit obstacles/hurdles/red-tape one has to navigate to arrive at a particular solution to a problem. Often the 'solution' doesn't necessarily address the problem directly but it instigates/communicates a particular mindset that is beneficial towards solving that problem in the long-run.
I find these granular 'connections' and 'disconnections' to be 'art' in the sense that it demands a specific interpretation of bureaucracy and government work that isn't necessarily plastered over the brochures/media articles people read.
I think you might have gone off the rails a bit toward the second half of the article, but your first half is solid.
Artists create art; craftsmen create useful objects. The purpose of art is to be admired and/or talked about. The purpose of useful objects is to fulfill some other function, and to do so efficiently. For example, a beautiful decorative 3d-printed vase made out of fractal lace is art; a regular jug that can reliably hold water is craft. This does not mean that the jug has to be ugly, or completely unadorned, or mass-produced; it could be a custom piece carved out of a single piece of jade by a master jadesmith up on a mountain in Japan somewhere -- but it *must* be watertight, weigh a reasonable amount, withstand being picked up by the handle, and so on. As long as there are restrictions in play other than the creators' own imagination, the object is craft, not art.
Most of the time, I come at these sorts of debates from the artist's side, so I think I can see both sides of this issue. I totally understand the craftsman's desire to create in the service of others, but I can also see the artist's point about stretching the boundaries. Quite often, the avant-garde artist is working in the service of other artists, defining and exploring the possibilities of their chosen medium - think Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions" but set in the artist's studio instead of the research scientist's laboratory. When the public gets to see the results, confusion often happens - but a lot of cutting-edge science can also be confusing.
In architecture, the debate centers around the proponents of "traditional", old-fashioned decoration (ornate columns, intricate stonework) who despise the new, avant-garde buildings with curtain walls and fanciful shapes. But isn't this just a difference in styles of craftsmanship, with different technics? Detailed stonework was the cutting edge of craftsmanship in the 1800s, and now the cutting edge is huge expanses of plate glass and carefully rolled steel shapes.
Of course, the whole emperor's-new-clothes, posturing-and-posing side of the current art scene just complicates the issue, and you brought out that complicatedness very well in this essay.
So I follow as far as the Artist/Craftsman distinction, and that's a useful way to think about work. Where you've lost me is where you conclude that all of life can be summed up as either about serving others or hurting others.
>You have the choice between living a life that leaves people satisfied in the way a good meal does, or one that leaves them feeling like they licked citrus foam out of a Lovecraft mouth to fulfill your wants at the expense of their own.
Honestly, this idea that all of our lives should be dedicated to serving others just seems like moralism. "Leaving others satisfied" is a really bizarre way of describing a successful life. My satisfaction doesn't matter in MY life? Sure, my *work* hopefully does some good for others, that's why I get paid by those others, but why in the world would I make basic life choices for other people, who are only tangentially, if at all, affected by my choices? And note that you conflate a person who is pursuing their wants with a person who is pursuing their wants at the expense of others—not the same thing.
This reasoning probably only makes sense for parents—and even for parents, it only applies at a quite young age. As your kids age, your decisions will become less and less important to them, and you're going to have to start detaching from them and letting them detach from you. If you enjoy playing altruist, enjoy it while it lasts, because by their 20s if not earlier, your kids won't give a damn how you live your life.
So there's several things here, I want to kind of break them out:
1. I think where you quoted me as saying as saying that you can either serve others or hurt others, I generally think that's true. I don't think that means you spend 100% of your time in purely selfless labor; nobody does that. But I think it does mean you maintain a mindset that what you do is about *more* than just yourself, or pursuit of non-people goals.
To take that back to a cooking metaphor, that doesn't mean you have to spend your entire life making bog-standard steaks. Improvisation is allowed! Sometimes you get to cook what you want for dinner! But where we'd find, say, someone who doesn't care about the other people who "eat" their output at all, I'd usually see that as a problem.
2. Nobody is saying your satisfaction doesn't matter at all in your own life. For better or worse, an article like this deals with archetypes; those seldom translate 1:1 to the complexity of life.
I think I'd argue a lot of your disagreement here comes down to overshooting what I actually said. If you read that last section, I think you will find I'm talking mostly about places where most people would believe a reasonable obligation exists; a parent to their children, a SE to their end-users, a writer to his or her readership. I don't think I can wholly parse what you mean by "basic life choices", but I don't *think* was trying to force you to make them differently in the way the forcefulness of your words seem to imply.
3. I'd wholly disagree for kids. If only because I know too many people who state their parents wrecked their life in one way or another in ways that either took a lot to recover from or couldn't be recovered from at all. Certainly at some point they will become adults and stand on their own feet; I don't expect to "own" them in their adulthood the way you seem to imply. I just want to do my best for them while I have them, and that involves a very great deal of not doing what I'd like if I were wholly self-focused.
4. This one is just real quick: Where you mentioned moralizing, I think you were correct but in reading the complaint I thought I warning was in order. I talk about morality/right/wrong a lot in a way that generally lines up with what you'd think of as judeo/christian dogma. So disliking that is fine, but I thought it worth warning you that it comes up fairly often, it's something I'm doing on purpose.
I'm going to betray my farm boy roots and put on my cultural-elite pretentious hat.
Anyone who goes to the MOMA and complains that the horses don't look like horses is either an idiot, or purposefully trying to stir up attention. The same applies for a restaurant like Bros. Unless they were blindly making reservations at a random restaurant, it should have been extremely clear what they were in for. They were given the exact experience that was advertised, which they then asked and paid for. This doesn't mean the experience was good, but it is disingenuous to pretend to be shocked and confused. When someone advertises that they don't think tables have 4 legs or should be flat, you don't get to complain when the table they give you is an egg.
Anyways, your analysis is great. I just can't stand the faux outrage about this type of stuff.
Kayla's response is a little in line with mine. I think the internet fixated pretty hard on the zombie-mouth for understandable reasons (I did too) but there's a lot of substantial complaints in the review, and in others I found on Tripadvisor and similar. This seems to go a bit beyond "this is a bit of an artsy restaurant with weird food" and into "they didn't actually give me food". I think one review said "there was nothing resembling a calorie; they were serving the impression of food."
I do agree that people who eat at restaurants that advertise sort of a modern art experience are asking for it. But I think there's gradients of that, so to speak, and "I have just left a restaurant but I was not fed" seems pretty substantially far down the spectrum.
Did you read the review, though? I would agree with you if the complaint was just "the food was weird," but they apparently got pretty terrible service, with one person served food they were allergic to, and another served *nothing* because of her allergies. That is not the typical experience at a Michelin-starred restaurant, nor was it what was advertised.
Of course I did. And those complaints are valid and unacceptable for any restaurant, let alone a one star.
But putting on my pretentious hat again: many small courses over many hours is usual. You don't get "mains" with extended tasting menus. Foams have been a mainstay at these types of restaurants for a decade now. Strange ice cream flavors are expected. "Air" dishes are nothing new. I have a real hard time believing a food blogger doesn't know any of this.
Y'know, I added your substack impulsively- I *think* because I liked your comments on DSL- in a "well, why not" spirit. Good to have backup stuff to read, in case I'm bored. Having it in my inbox means I know where to look for it. But it's become one of my favorite things to see there- I just checked my mails, saw I had things from like four substacks, and noticed I was significantly more excited about this one than the others. Just wanted to say well-done!
That's a hell of a nice thing to say - thank you, Jack.
I think there might be a missing third archetype. What art was.
Craftsmen make an object for the sake of the user.
"Artists" make art for to express themselves.
But when I think of enduring art, I don't think of pieces that seem to have been made merely to fit the whims of a patron nor the artist. Rather, a piece that attempts to express an objective beauty or truth. Art for God, art for art. Never mind the boundaries nor the utility, but what is capital-G Good? Having lost a belief in objectivity, artists mistake being true to themselves (whatever that means) for being Truth.
In the instance of the restaurant, I think real art needs to consider the telos of it. Some slime in a plaster mold is hardly food. A meal can aspire to be more than a workman like plate of pleasant gruel, but conversely doesn't eschew pleasing the eater with a satisfying meal--you aren't then elevating your dish to art, you are losing sight of what you are there to do.
That's... surprisingly accurate. Art without an ideal the artist can aim at is just random pareidolic noise meaningful only to the author.
Very good essay. I have had this sort of conversation so many times in a number of contexts, and I keep coming back to the line from Calvin and Hobbes "The problem with being avant-garde is knowing who's is putting on who."
The reviewer expected food, made by a chef, that would do the things food does well: have interesting qualities, take care of hunger, etc. The chef thinks he is innovating cuisine, and if his customers don't like it, it is because they don't get it. Both are wrong. The reviewer for the reasons discussed, but the chef because he is not a chef innovating food for a living. His actual paying audience are the sort of people who want to show other people how elite they are. The type who want to be seen to be at a fancy place, a place so fancy regular people don't understand it. They don't care if they enjoy the food, they merely want to appear to be able to appreciate what lesser folk cannot, and simultaneously not be able to enjoy what the lesser folk do. The food isn't the point; it might as well not even be there.
That is the grift of avant-garde, both the emperor and the peasants have no clothes, but claiming to see beautiful clothing is a sign of being elite. Any pleb can recognize that they are naked.
The risk comes from when one side, the "artist" or the "connoisseur" stops telling the lie, leaving the other party to flounder around, suddenly cast out of the elite and into the plebs who will never accept them.
I think that describes a lot of modern culture, when you get down to it.
> whether we are living our lives in pursuit of ourselves, an abstract, or others
Are you offering 3 options in this statement, or 2: "ourselves - an abstract", and "others"?
the art-craft distinction as only in terms of Avant Garde (innovation) vs conforming to standards (utility), whilst at the same time being of the same class level, in uniquely odd. almost as if "art" is a bit of socially dysfunctional madness incarnate? https://archive.ph/QpDW4 https://kirkegaard.substack.com/p/the-verbal-tilt-model
A counter-theory towards this kind of "same average ability, but bias between language vs science", is that the distinction between high art and "porn" (as in "insight porn" and "hustle porn") is a bit blurred, while expert craft's elevation to an art form in-and-of-itself is different from content-esque forms of mass referential media. More references noted here: https://bradnbutter.substack.com/p/porn-martyrs-cyborgs-part-2
Seductive art is packed with gestalt (e.g. mashing words together like an AI), but expert craft is semantically coherent and takes a genius mind to do it. A simple litmus test is to ask "Could Buzzfeed or Five Minute Craft replicate this?" https://thephilosophersmeme.com/2018/03/27/memes-jokes-and-visual-puns/
With software engineering, the most annoying purists are the craftsmen, and the other side is "move fast break things" pragmatists. Which is an entirely different conversation, kinda reminiscent of the explorations of quality in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Given that I'm not a software engineer, this is a blind spot for me. I'm sort of imagining it like this:
1. The purist craftsman wants every line of code documented; he wants everything to adhere with an excruciating level precision to some standard they like. This is usually overkill, and slows everything down, like a swordsmith who demands every sword be absolutely perfect and thus fails (and makes others fail) to outfit an army.
2. The guy who always wants to try new variations of this and that, wants to be fancy, doesn't care about function, thinks people are stepping on his genius.
1-2 are overreaches, and then there's balance guy:
3. Guy who assesses the situation and bends the tools to the best use of the situation, being strict where it provides utility and not allowing himself freedom that will not prove useful.
I tend to think of 3. as a craftsman and 1-2 as kinds of artists, but I'm biased to my own dichotemy/idea so I think I'm probably being a bit unfair by doing so.
It's... complicated.
One axis is maintainability vs workload. You can do things "the right way" (craftsmen) but it often involves ripping out and reworking huge parts of the system as the requirements change or the inevitable collision with reality shows the original design was bad. Developer time is expensive and the client will hate the very idea of using up more. Alternatively, you can slap a quick fix that'll work, but accumulation of such fixes makes the system a terrible mess that is impossible to understand, reason about and modify further - this process is referred to as accumulating "tech debt", with the implication that at some point you should pay the debt and straighten things out. Most complex projects are somewhere in between, with seasoned projects being a pristine architecture that then got corrupted with increasingly terrible hacks. So, that's balancing long-term vs short-term benefit.
Then you have a tradeoff between elegance/maintainability and function. There are paradigms of software development which make programs really easy to debug and/or not introduce bugs in the first place, but impose a performance overhead. Here the line between artists and craftsmen gets blurred - you can definitely go overboard with it where your solution is super elegant but terrible on every metric, but many people would still call it good craftsmanship because the underlying architecture is neat and easy to modify.
And then you have people who love new shiny things and would like to push them into every project, sometimes referred to as "resume-driven development" (since they can claim they worked on the new shiny thing in their previous job). The new shiny thing probably has cool features that help, but it's also a barely tested mess with an underdeveloped supporting ecosystem. This group has considerable overlap with architecture purists, and pragmatists obviously hate their guts.
The difference between mid-level and senior engineers is largely the ability to decide well on these tradeoffs depending on the problem.
There is a quote from Terry Pratchett: "It was a work of art. It was better than that. It was a work of craft"
I think this captures a lot of this - most of the great works of art were craftsman who had perfected their craft, through repetition, practice, focus etc. Shakespeare, Michelangelo - craftsmen who made a living through their craft
Pratchett himself was a craftsman - the books he wrote were not art, he was a craftsman refining his technique. But they became better than any books written to be art (literary novels etc).
Beautifully written. I've mulled over the distinction between art and craftsmanship many times.
I work in government and at a cursory glance, it is completely justifiable to say that there is very little 'art' involved in the mind-numbing tedium of policy research and strategy (my area of work). But every so often I see my work as an 'artform' primarily due to the amount of implicit obstacles/hurdles/red-tape one has to navigate to arrive at a particular solution to a problem. Often the 'solution' doesn't necessarily address the problem directly but it instigates/communicates a particular mindset that is beneficial towards solving that problem in the long-run.
I find these granular 'connections' and 'disconnections' to be 'art' in the sense that it demands a specific interpretation of bureaucracy and government work that isn't necessarily plastered over the brochures/media articles people read.
I think you might have gone off the rails a bit toward the second half of the article, but your first half is solid.
Artists create art; craftsmen create useful objects. The purpose of art is to be admired and/or talked about. The purpose of useful objects is to fulfill some other function, and to do so efficiently. For example, a beautiful decorative 3d-printed vase made out of fractal lace is art; a regular jug that can reliably hold water is craft. This does not mean that the jug has to be ugly, or completely unadorned, or mass-produced; it could be a custom piece carved out of a single piece of jade by a master jadesmith up on a mountain in Japan somewhere -- but it *must* be watertight, weigh a reasonable amount, withstand being picked up by the handle, and so on. As long as there are restrictions in play other than the creators' own imagination, the object is craft, not art.
Most of the time, I come at these sorts of debates from the artist's side, so I think I can see both sides of this issue. I totally understand the craftsman's desire to create in the service of others, but I can also see the artist's point about stretching the boundaries. Quite often, the avant-garde artist is working in the service of other artists, defining and exploring the possibilities of their chosen medium - think Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions" but set in the artist's studio instead of the research scientist's laboratory. When the public gets to see the results, confusion often happens - but a lot of cutting-edge science can also be confusing.
In architecture, the debate centers around the proponents of "traditional", old-fashioned decoration (ornate columns, intricate stonework) who despise the new, avant-garde buildings with curtain walls and fanciful shapes. But isn't this just a difference in styles of craftsmanship, with different technics? Detailed stonework was the cutting edge of craftsmanship in the 1800s, and now the cutting edge is huge expanses of plate glass and carefully rolled steel shapes.
Of course, the whole emperor's-new-clothes, posturing-and-posing side of the current art scene just complicates the issue, and you brought out that complicatedness very well in this essay.
So I follow as far as the Artist/Craftsman distinction, and that's a useful way to think about work. Where you've lost me is where you conclude that all of life can be summed up as either about serving others or hurting others.
>You have the choice between living a life that leaves people satisfied in the way a good meal does, or one that leaves them feeling like they licked citrus foam out of a Lovecraft mouth to fulfill your wants at the expense of their own.
Honestly, this idea that all of our lives should be dedicated to serving others just seems like moralism. "Leaving others satisfied" is a really bizarre way of describing a successful life. My satisfaction doesn't matter in MY life? Sure, my *work* hopefully does some good for others, that's why I get paid by those others, but why in the world would I make basic life choices for other people, who are only tangentially, if at all, affected by my choices? And note that you conflate a person who is pursuing their wants with a person who is pursuing their wants at the expense of others—not the same thing.
This reasoning probably only makes sense for parents—and even for parents, it only applies at a quite young age. As your kids age, your decisions will become less and less important to them, and you're going to have to start detaching from them and letting them detach from you. If you enjoy playing altruist, enjoy it while it lasts, because by their 20s if not earlier, your kids won't give a damn how you live your life.
So there's several things here, I want to kind of break them out:
1. I think where you quoted me as saying as saying that you can either serve others or hurt others, I generally think that's true. I don't think that means you spend 100% of your time in purely selfless labor; nobody does that. But I think it does mean you maintain a mindset that what you do is about *more* than just yourself, or pursuit of non-people goals.
To take that back to a cooking metaphor, that doesn't mean you have to spend your entire life making bog-standard steaks. Improvisation is allowed! Sometimes you get to cook what you want for dinner! But where we'd find, say, someone who doesn't care about the other people who "eat" their output at all, I'd usually see that as a problem.
2. Nobody is saying your satisfaction doesn't matter at all in your own life. For better or worse, an article like this deals with archetypes; those seldom translate 1:1 to the complexity of life.
I think I'd argue a lot of your disagreement here comes down to overshooting what I actually said. If you read that last section, I think you will find I'm talking mostly about places where most people would believe a reasonable obligation exists; a parent to their children, a SE to their end-users, a writer to his or her readership. I don't think I can wholly parse what you mean by "basic life choices", but I don't *think* was trying to force you to make them differently in the way the forcefulness of your words seem to imply.
3. I'd wholly disagree for kids. If only because I know too many people who state their parents wrecked their life in one way or another in ways that either took a lot to recover from or couldn't be recovered from at all. Certainly at some point they will become adults and stand on their own feet; I don't expect to "own" them in their adulthood the way you seem to imply. I just want to do my best for them while I have them, and that involves a very great deal of not doing what I'd like if I were wholly self-focused.
4. This one is just real quick: Where you mentioned moralizing, I think you were correct but in reading the complaint I thought I warning was in order. I talk about morality/right/wrong a lot in a way that generally lines up with what you'd think of as judeo/christian dogma. So disliking that is fine, but I thought it worth warning you that it comes up fairly often, it's something I'm doing on purpose.
I'm going to betray my farm boy roots and put on my cultural-elite pretentious hat.
Anyone who goes to the MOMA and complains that the horses don't look like horses is either an idiot, or purposefully trying to stir up attention. The same applies for a restaurant like Bros. Unless they were blindly making reservations at a random restaurant, it should have been extremely clear what they were in for. They were given the exact experience that was advertised, which they then asked and paid for. This doesn't mean the experience was good, but it is disingenuous to pretend to be shocked and confused. When someone advertises that they don't think tables have 4 legs or should be flat, you don't get to complain when the table they give you is an egg.
Anyways, your analysis is great. I just can't stand the faux outrage about this type of stuff.
Kayla's response is a little in line with mine. I think the internet fixated pretty hard on the zombie-mouth for understandable reasons (I did too) but there's a lot of substantial complaints in the review, and in others I found on Tripadvisor and similar. This seems to go a bit beyond "this is a bit of an artsy restaurant with weird food" and into "they didn't actually give me food". I think one review said "there was nothing resembling a calorie; they were serving the impression of food."
I do agree that people who eat at restaurants that advertise sort of a modern art experience are asking for it. But I think there's gradients of that, so to speak, and "I have just left a restaurant but I was not fed" seems pretty substantially far down the spectrum.
Did you read the review, though? I would agree with you if the complaint was just "the food was weird," but they apparently got pretty terrible service, with one person served food they were allergic to, and another served *nothing* because of her allergies. That is not the typical experience at a Michelin-starred restaurant, nor was it what was advertised.
Of course I did. And those complaints are valid and unacceptable for any restaurant, let alone a one star.
But putting on my pretentious hat again: many small courses over many hours is usual. You don't get "mains" with extended tasting menus. Foams have been a mainstay at these types of restaurants for a decade now. Strange ice cream flavors are expected. "Air" dishes are nothing new. I have a real hard time believing a food blogger doesn't know any of this.