Systems We Have Loved: Reading and Discussion with Eve Meltzer

Eve Meltzer Associate Professor of Visual Studies at NYU, will read excerpts from her new book, Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual Art, Affect, and the Antihumanist Turn, and discuss its relationship to Ferran Adrià’s ambitious culinary, systematic, and drawn aspects.

In 1957, the French literary and cultural critic Roland Barthes famously interpreted the collective representations of his own culture as a “system” of signs that could be analyzed like a language. The association of Adrià’s work with the idea of language and systems, in nearly the same sense that Barthes intended, has been drawn time and again by the chef. Meltzer’s focus undoubtedly begs the question: is Adrià’s culinary vision a new twist on the decades-old structuralist mantra that “everything is structured like a language?”