This week I read two New Yorker pieces during my subway ride: "Red, White, and Bleu" by Bil Buford -- a review of three books flamboyantly and viscerally (pun intended) celebrating meat; and "Art and Commerce" by Patricia Marx, ironically and bemusedly celebrating the phenomenon of museum gift shops. The museum piece was fun and light-hearted. It both rejoinced in and mocked the uneasy but perhaps unavoidable merger of art and consumerism. It reviewed many of the large number of museum shops in the city, and included a range descriptions of interesting pieces in a range of prices (from a limited-edition facsimile of the Book of Hours: $5,300 to a vitrine holding "clever trompe-l'oeil adhesive tape that is made to look like a rococo gold frame" for $15). The whole piece just made me want to go out and spend, spend, spend. And it made me wish I had a super nice apartment to hold all these museum gifts.
The reviews of the butchery, meat, cooking books was a bit less gentile. It featured these three intense meat promoters and their ideology, which I am sympathetic too. But it also included descriptions of slaughter as well as a critique of the way our lives distance us from the reality of our predatory and carnivorous natures.
"Why is it considered entertainment when a predator kills another animal in a wild-life film... 'whereas the final moments of human predation of our farmed livestock are considered too disturbing and shameful to be made available even for information'... If you fear the sight of a carcass, you shouldn't be eating from it."
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