Bites of Luxury: From the Renaissance to the Kardashians
Willem Claesz. Heda, Still Life with a Lobster, 1650-9, The National Gallery London and Instagram / @fila_global
What do Renaissance painters, your favorite influencers, the Flemish masters, and the Kardashians have in common? According to @kfesteryga on TikTok, they represent the trend in positioning food as a luxury commodity. The TikTok influencer’s account is dedicated to tracking how food pops up in celebrity culture, from the photos of Hailey Bieber's FILA collaboration featuring the glammed-up celebrity spilling produce from a brown paper grocery bag, to Zendaya’s luscious grape adorned Met Gala gown. The visual display of food and the excess of it is hardly new.This type of imagery has been at the center of visual art for centuries. So, how did this trend come about, and how is it being used in celebrity culture today?
The tradition of depicting food and feasting exists throughout art history, dating back to ancient Greece and Rome, where food appeared often in a symbolic manner in relation to gods and goddesses - grapes for Bacchus, god of wine, for example, or the pomegranate for its fateful role in the myth of Hades and Persephone. The role of food takes center stage in Peter Paul Rubens’s The Judgement of Paris, which features Paris offering a golden apple to Venus, the beginning of the famous Trojan War.
Peter Paul Rubens, The Judgement of Paris, c. 1632-5. The National Gallery, London
By the seventeenth century, still-life painting flourished as an independent genre and enjoyed popularity among an affluent clientele. The expensive delicacies depicted were associated with a privileged lifestyle that could afford such objects and were viewed as reminders of luxury and gluttony. Olives, a lemon, satin cloths, richly adorned tableware, and - most notably - a large, bright red lobster are skillfully rendered in Willem Claesz’s painting, Still Life with a Lobster. To a seventeenth-century viewer, these objects immediately would suggest wealth and extravagance as expensive luxuries were sourced from Dutch merchants around the globe. Paintings like this showcased Dutch dominance in trade and displayed national pride and wealth through rare and exotic food.
Willem Claesz. Heda, Still Life with a Lobster, 1650-9. The National Gallery, London
This symbolic quality of food within paintings has transformed over the years and now lands itself at the center of contemporary celebrity and social media culture. In the past few years - with increased food prices and food insecurity during the Covid-19 pandemic - food has found itself at the center of celebrity and “wealth culture” in surprising ways. Take, for example, the Kardashians boasting huge table displays of untouched out-of-season fruit, excessive bouquets of flowers, and endless streams of In-and-Out burgers, contrasted with the continuously rising cost of living for the rest of us. This type of food excess, then, becomes a status symbol as a result of the expense of groceries, resulting in the sad truth that fresh produce is a luxury good.
The next time you are fawning over a video of Erewhon’s $20 smoothie, a sculpture made entirely of butter, a post about “tomato-girl summer,” or sardine-themed clothing or jewelry, you might just be at the center of a food-related status war, in which these are just another item our generation has chosen as a form of affordable affluence.