Art lies in the eyes of the aesthete
By Manohar Malgonkar

SONGS are sung to it and toasts drunk in its honour. It has been a favourite subject of famous painters. A regiment of guards is named after it, and expatriate Englishmen manning the distant outposts of the Empire tended to go misty-eyed when they talked about it.

The roast beef of England.

There are restaurants in England which make a speciality of serving the national dish as no doubt it was meant to eaten: while it was actually being cooked. Fortnum's, Scott's, Simpsons, the Grillroom at the Dorchester — to name some of the prominent ones — are famed for their roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.

The man who had asked me to lunch was some sort of a front-man for a major Hollywood studio. We were escorted to a reserved table and after a ritualistic exchange of pleasantries and handed atlas-sized menus covered in crimson leather. I can never decipher a fancy menu anyhow, and knowing that the meal that we were about to eat would be charged to some studio's expense account, had decided to treat myself to an "all red'' lunch. So I made a pretence of looking at the menu and ordered it: Lobster and a fresh-strawberries dessert, and hoped that my host would not fail to order just the right red wine to go with my choice of dishes. He did. A Burgundy. The way he talked about the wines with the wine-steward made me realise that he was something of a wine-fancier. He did his sampling like a professional. He first rolled the wine in the glass and waved the glass under his nose before taking a sip, which he savoured, before swallowing. He made a ring of his right thumb and forefinger and pronounced: "Just right."

Earlier, he had cavaliarly waived away the menu and told the gentleman who took the orders that he would "take something from the cart." When they trundled the cart to our table and raised the huge copper cover, I could have sworn that they had brought up a whole roasting ox, spluttering and oozing brown juices. My host gazed at it raptly before pointing out the bits and pieces he wanted to eat. He turned to me and said: "What a picture it makes? Beef roasting!"

Sure I had been a little put off by the proximity of a large hunk of beef in the process of being cooked, and yet I had to admit that it made a striking abstract painting, a riot of autumn shades which were changing even as we were looking at them.

But then burning meat as art! It just didn't make sense.

For some one like myself, brought up as a Hindu in a cow-worshipping land, it is not easy to come to terms with the idea that an enormous hunk from an ox's body burning slowly over an invisible fire is a work of art. But then my lifelong exposure to a broad international culture prevailed. Even as I was ritualistically finishing off my Red lunch with the remains of the Burgundy, I found myself agreeing with my host: The meat hung on the serving trolly did indeed resemble a canvas by some post-impressionist painter, say, Ronato Gussoto or, even more, Andre Masson.

But that is as far as I can go. I draw the line at raw, or rotting beef being exhibited as a work of art. I don't think I would have been able to enjoy my expensive lunch — or indeed manage to eat it — If I had to sit at a table in the proximity of the art collection installed by one of London's best-known restaurants, Quo Vadis in Soho for its launching in 1997: The flayed heads of cows in a bath of formaldehyde.

If that is the new trend for decorating fashionable eating places in the west, it is just as well that I don't go abroad any more. Then again, even if I do go to London again, it is not likely that I shall venture into a restaurant where the price of a normal meal, with the customary half-bottle of wine, comes to around £ 40 (Rs 3000) Crazy!

I was glad to read, however, that other people too objected to those cows' heads displayed as decorations. There were street demonstrations by animal liberationists. Police had to be called and arrests made.

The fact that these demonstrators were some kind of animal lovers and not commandos on behalf of what is seemly in art, makes my point. There can be no agreement on what constitutes an art-work. Indeed that, from the turn of the 20th century, art itself has cut loose from conventional bonds and escaped into the sphere of undefinable concepts. Now it is like the letter aum of the Hindu scriptures. It is everything but it is also nothing.

One of the world's most influential newspapers, the New York Times, recently sent round a letter to a score or so Americans whose opinions on matters of art it valued, asking them the precise question: What is art? The only thing common to all the answers was that there just was no answer.

A veteran American Congressman, Peter Hoekstra who has strong views on whether the state should support its artists, came out with the most serviceable definition: "There can be no definition of art, because art is just whatever people say it is." So there it is. We may not like it, but art is whatever anyone says is art.

At least it sets up free from the self-important pronouncements of art experts. The fact is that even the experts, the professionals, don't always know good art from bad or even recognise the talents of an artist by seeing his work. In 1886, a young man who was largely a self-taught dabbler in paint, joined the arts Academy in Antwarp so that he could make his drawings from living models. His teachers shook their heads at his efforts and told him that his drawings were so bad that he would have to join the beginners class. The young man was Vincent Van Gogh, and that year when he was told to go to bottom of class, he painted one of his masterpieces, The Potato Eaters.

So now it is a free-for-all. Marc Quin creates his artworks by using blood and refrigeration equipment — and why not? Eric Magnusson was able to get a high price for a gold-leaf rendering of a stain he had made by urinating in a corner of his studio. The actor Tommy Lee Jones possesses a cityscape executed in molasses, sand and the juice of berries. Chris Ofili uses oil paint, but also needs polyester resin, map pins and elephant dung for his type of work, and If Serge keeps in his sitting room a lucite box which may have come straight from the Quo Vadis: it contains the head of a cow crawling with maggots.

Art for art's sake!.