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Comment by mturmon | Hacker News Reader

The artist you have noted, Janine Antoni, did the famous piece Gnaw (a huge cube of gnawed chocolate) as well as the chocolate busts you mention. Here's a summary of her intentions:

http://www.artnews.com/2013/02/21/chocolate-self-portraits-b...

Smelling the chocolate, and indeed the possibility of a transgressive viewer licking it, is definitely part of the piece. Brown paint wouldn't cut it.

On the subject of smelly rooms, I was able to experience the chocolate room by Anya Gallacio (http://beautifuldecay.com/2014/05/27/anya-gallaccio-creates-...), and let me say, a whole gallery room that smelled of chocolate was highly memorable. I did not lick the wall, but it was allowed. Delightful!

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It seems to me that if the smell of chocolate is part of the desired experience, you design and render that smell. Random link on artificial smells: https://foodbabe.com/2015/02/16/the-behind-the-scenes-market...

What kind of chocolate smell do we want? How sweet? How much vanilla note? How much burnt component? How concentrated or diffused in space? We probably don't want the smell to change over time, just like you probably don't want the colors in a painting to change over time.

To me, making the artifact out of chocolate is a bad way of creating a chocolate smell. The exposed surface area will offgas and oxidize, resulting in a diminishing and changing smell. It seems lazy; it also seems like "confusing the map with the territory".

Because the artist invited the public to lick the chocolate-covered walls of her sculpture, it's safe to assume she wanted it to change over time, and it seems evident that real chocolate was required. For words to that effect, see her quote in the link I offered above, or her statement at: http://visarts.ucsd.edu/faculty/anya-gallaccio

In general, underestimating the intentionality of top-tier artists is a losing proposition. Calling them "lazy" without even casually experiencing their work looks to me like typical nerd philistinism.

Yours is a consistent and reasoned approach to making art.

But a lot of what makes modern and contemporary art exciting (for me, anyways) is an ongoing flirtation with what's authentic or made of "real" materials, and what it means to value that, and how artworks are not fixed artifacts but ongoing systems.

If the chocolate bust challenges collectors and scientists to discover new things about preserving chocolate, then that discovery becomes part of the work's story.

There is a reason installations list the materials they're made of in the title card.

Take a work like Love Remembered [1] this could have been easily created using actual pills but making the piece with actual pills is a completely different work of art than painstakingly sculpturing a representation of real pills. The same way Crematorium [2] could have been recreated using sculptured cigarette butts and a synthetic smoke smell but it wouldn't be the same experience as walking up to the piece and about a meter or so away the stale stench of smoke hits you (the piece genuinely reeks) and knowing that it's real stale cigarettes.

[1] http://www.damienhirst.com/images/hirstimage/DHS6220DtlL1_77...

[2] http://www.damienhirst.com/images/hirstimage/DHS469rt1_771_0...

I'd assume you could paint it with chocolate as well though

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