Gastro-Vision: Eating Your Vegetables Is a Luxury

Sharon Core, Early American, Still Life with Vegetables, 2008. C-print, 16-1/2 x 22-1/4 in. 

Courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery ©Sharon Core.

Gastro-Vision launched last August with a two-part post about the trend in urban farming. Interest in sustainable and local food practices continues to spread among creative types and appears to be gaining momentum. More and more, artists are learning hands-on farming techniques and cultivating their own crops, while artspaces are starting to play host to farmers markets, composting workshops, gardening roundtables, and food residencies. The latest development: an auction of heirloom vegetables to be held at Sotheby’s New York in September.

The Art of Farming is advertised as the first event of its kind “to celebrate edible heirlooms and the art involved in their creation.” An afternoon program of gallery talks on art and food will precede an evening sale of rarities like Turkish Orange Eggplant, Pink Banana Pumpkin, and Lady Godiva Squash, all grown by farmers from the Tri-State area. This all sounds like a good idea, but the asking price of $1,000 per crate? Not so much.

The art world is known for being inaccessible and, in this field, outrageous prices are par for the course. (It was Sotheby’s that recently sold the world’s most expensive Warhol portrait at $32.6 million.) Food, however, is a basic human necessity that every living person should have access to. When 49 million people in the United States alone are food insecure, meaning they are unable to afford all the food they need for an active and healthy life, it seems awfully dangerous to associate high art price tags with vegetables, no matter how uncommon they are.

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