Feed thy soul … and stomach?

So is cooking art?

The idea that it is seems to be gaining traction, and not just among foodies. Dinner comes out of contemporary restaurant kitchens these days looking like architecture (or at least a vertical section of sedimentary strata) and featuring exotic combinations of ingredients that turn ordinary menus into what read like excerpts from Dune (and, maybe someday, seafood into winged codpieces….). Cooking shows make the poaching of eggs and the chopping of jicama a drama a la Rambo. The raspberry sauce drizzled around molten chocolate cake resembles an unsigned Pollock.

Iron Chef Michael Symon even shared a 2008 Cleveland Arts Prize for bringing national attention to the city’s culinary creativity.  

 But the question has continued to drift through my head like the dubious aroma of mystery meat as I’ve watched Julie & Julia - the recent movie about famed chef Julia Child and the disciple who tries to make every one of the recipes in Child’s book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking – and subsequently read Child’s memoir, My Life in France.

Clearly, kitchen geniuses such as Symon and Child have many things in common with artists. Their creativity leads them to experiment with new and surprising combinations of elements. They possess an eye for presentation that’s pleasing in color, form, texture and composition. Their rigorous attention to craft ensures the highest and most consistent quality of execution and result. And on top of all that, they’ve worked hard to gain a thorough knowledge of, and expertise with, all the tools of their discipline, from foodstuffs to pastry bags. I suspect that Rembrandt did not know more about light and paint and canvas than Child knew about heat and meats and pans.

And if someone argued that food can’t be art because it disappears by the end of dinner, I’d have to point out that many works, such as avant-garde performance pieces, are intentionally ephemeral and are no less art because of it.  

But I would agree that food – and cooking – are not art. And here’s why: Art is about content, about an emotional or intellectual message of some sort that the artist is trying to impart to his audience. And food and cooking don’t have any.

Food can create a mood. Heavy and dark? Light and frothy? Comforting? Challenging? Yes. But you won’t find what’s on your plate deliberately leading you to evaluate human relationships, feel loss, ponder the effects of technology or consider death. (I mean, if it did, would you want to eat that?) Like most art, well-prepared food does delight the senses, but it doesn’t inform and enrich the mind. Instead it nourishes the body.

That’s not art. But I think you could call it love.

(Photo, top, from Sweet Mary)

Creatively serving up access to capital

If you’re born smart, you’ll probably find a way to educate yourself whether you have access to classes or not – but a scholarship sure does help.  Same thing with creativity:  A person with the deep desire to concoct something will try to bring that thing about with or without personal wealth.

It’s just that money makes the whole process so much easier. And so much more likely to succeed.  And there’s so frighteningly little of it right now – especially for artists, inventors and entrepreneurs, most of whom have a wretchedly hard time persuading people to back them even in a prosperous economy. 

So it’s all the more satisfying to find that human imagination has started finding ways around the brick walls and barbed wire that so often separate creative people from the funding they need. As Will Limkemann explained  not long ago in his Geniocity.com blog, peer-to-peer lending now offers entrepreneurs an easier, online path to low-cost business loans than through a gantlet of interviews and paper chases with bank  or federal-agency officers.  That took inspiration. So did Kickstarter, an online service that invites people  to raise money for their creative projects in sort of the same way that American Idol performers win their competitions - by public vote. Except that Kickstarter allows many people to succeed.

Now there’s something new arising across America that not only provides creative people with a simpler and shorter path to money, but also pulls down the barriers between art, food and entrepreneurship  in a way that  gives us at Geniocity.com little frissons of joy. It’s called A Moveable FEAST and it should appeal to a lot of communities, including my home city of Cleveland, where local hero-slash-nationally-acclaimed-Iron-Chef Michael Symon was recently awarded a Cleveland Arts Prize and another artful chef, Ben Bebenroth, won a 2009 COSE  Ten Under 10 small-business award for his organic/local food enterprise, Spice of Life Catering Co.

Local chapters of the FEAST – Minneapolis’ is one of the latest –  present big vegetarian dinners carried out with the help of a local farm. Several hundred people are invited to attend a dinner for a reasonable price – $10 or $20 -  and view a number of art projects displayed around the room. The artist whose project gets the most votes gets the collected dinner money and the chance to come back the next time to update everyone on his or her current work.

Cool, no? I don’t know about you, but I’m getting pretty tired of  having so much of the world’s usable capital locked up inside so many armed and moated fortresses and spending all my time trying to figure out the secret handshake  to the money club. Like sisters, maybe creative people can do it for themselves by helping each other succeed.

Real help for entrepreneurs: It’s in the (COSE conference) bag

The thing about conferences is that, so often, all you hear while you’re there is people grousing about the same old problems and repeating whatever has become the latest conventional wisdom about solving them. It’s pretty rare to come away with a lot of useful ideas and strategies.

But when the COSE 2008 Small Business Conference ended yesterday, I found myself with a bagful of  practical tactics that I have already started trying out and a good number of contacts I know I can call on for needed services or just some additional advice.  I’ve got step-by-step notes on how to market my business more effectively online through e-mail, organic search optimization and timely posts on news-release sites. I’ve also learned a bit about analytics and what they should be able to tell me about how my site is working – or isn’t – and why.

And I listened to other people’s experiences and discovered that their perspectives reinforced many of my own instinctive beliefs about how to establish my business. So now I feel less afraid to stick to my concept, plan and intuition.

That sure beats a load of refrigerator magnets, brochures and a few more slight acquaintances. 

The two-day annual convention opened Wednesday with a keynote speech by Michael Symon, the star restaurateur of Cleveland known by the rest of the nation as America’s reigning Iron Chef. The business crowd ought to listen to people like Symon more often – it’s like stepping out on the playground and hearing the honest reactions of kids after listening to a week’s worth of press-office statements full of steely, upbeat spin from carefully scripted bureaucrats. 

The man’s an artist as irrepressibly natural as he is gifted and focused. He tells funny stories and laughs at them himself with a cartoon-Tigger giggle. He started his first restaurant, Lola, with $120,000 from a customer who believed in him. The people who took jobs with Symon then still work for him. And when he recently opened two new Cleveland eateries, he did it with only $80 to his name, having used up the remainder of an $800,000 bank loan paying his staff their wages during the nine months they were idled by delays on the reincarnated Lola. 

That’s class. That’s also creative nerve.  

Symon had two messages. They weren’t new, but from him, they were clearly true:

- Treat your employees and associates right, and they will reward you with loyalty and good treatment of your customers

- And start your business from a passion to change the world, because it’s that passion, and not a desire to be rich, that will carry you through everything you’ll have to endure to succeed. 

The two other convention speakers echoed those same lessons in their own ways. John Moore, the relentless master marketer of Starbucks and Whole Foods, urged professionalism and good customer-responsiveness (treat people right!), along with sharp focus (passion!) no matter how small or big your company. Debbi Fields, who founded Mrs. Fields Cookies, advised not accepting no (passion!) and making customers feel valued and special (treat people right!).

They’re all correct. Still,  inspiration goes only so far when you’re struggling with the day-to-day crises and dilemmas of birthing a business. Entrepreneurs need tools and those are exactly what the COSE conference offered its members: more than 50 seminars on practical matters ranging from communications and the latest regulatory changes affecting businesses to workers’ compensation and preventative health care for employees; dozens of exhibitors with services to offer and information to give away; and COSE’s own programs, from sector support groups to reduced-cost services to educational opportunities, not to mention the reassuring solidarity of shared problems and interests that comes from COSE’s membership of almost 17,000 companies.

Far from being a gigantic kvetch session, this conference actually helped.

Cleveland has a lot of problems. But excellent operational assistance and advocacy for the small-business sector isn’t one of them.

Big time at the Small Business Conference

I am knee-walking tired. I got through the intense first day of the COSE 2008 Small Business Conference yesterday and barely had the strength to drive home again.

But it was a good kind of catatonic exhaustion.

I climbed - fell is more like it – out of bed at 5:30 a.m. Wednesday to get to Cleveland’s IX Center for a full day of listening to keynote speakers, attending an e-mail marketing seminar, exploring exhibitor displays, recording a promotional interview about Geniocity.com by SBTV.com, sitting on a lively panel about social networking and blogging, and talking with some of the hundreds of other people who showed up. That’s a lot of opportunities for one sleep-deprived entrepreneur to pursue. 

By Friday, I’ll have a full round-up of conference events for you, including what Cleveland’s own Iron Chef, Michael Symon, had to say about starting a business and what branding wisdom was passed along by John Moore, marketing whiz for Starbucks and Whole Foods Market. 

Assuming I’m conscious enough by the end of the conference to sit up and type.