Gumi Shibata. Fried shrimps, tomato pasta, salad. Japan. 9:51am, JST.
It’s official: the oft-maligned habit of taking Instagram shots of one’s food before eating is now art.
Brooklyn-based artist David Horvitz has invited artists all over the world to share photos and short descriptions of their morning meals with online audiences throughout the day today as part of the online project “Artist Breakfast.” The 24-hour event recalls the old saying “It’s five o’clock somewhere,” a cliché that holds just as true for breakfast as it does for happy hour.
“Artist Breakfast” is the first artist commission to be hosted on “Post: Notes on Modern & Contemporary Art Around the Globe,” an online journal, archive, exhibition space and forum run by New York’s Museum of Modern Art. It serves as the public face of the art and geography research project C-MAP: Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives. Horvitz intends the pieces to serve as a commentary on the globalized, 24-hour workday that has become the 21st-century norm.
Kicking off the daylong meal were artists hailing from regions just west of the International Date Line, such as Australia and New Zealand. The event should end as late risers in Hawaii and French Polynesia polish off their first meal of the day within the next couple of hours.
The meals on view showcase a range of breakfast foods both traditional and offbeat; submissions can be sorted by meal components such as cereal, marmite, kimchi and nutella. The intriguing “breast milk” category yields zero results, while 27 participants had eggs this morning. The most commonly imbibed food/beverage appears to be coffee, which is tagged 86 times, once in a photo from Houston, Tex., that features only American Spirit cigarettes and a mug of black coffee, with the following explanation: “Because I stayed up too late with one Partha Chatterjee.”
“Artist Breakfast” coincides with tonight’s “middling reception” for Horvitz’s show “David Horvitz: In Search of a Longitude, Penelope Umbrico: In Search of a Latitude” at New York exhibition space Recess; it’s halfway through its run, which ends Aug. 10.
