Food's Fiscal Facts, Marinetti, and the "Art of Eating"

Food's Fiscal Facts from Avalanche 4, 1972. Shown at "From the Archives: 40 Years / 40 Projects," at White Columns, New York. Photo: 16 Miles [more]

Gordon Matta-Clark's Food restaurant ran the advertisement above at the end of 1972, the first year of the restaurant's operation. Favorite parts: 1,111 lbs of baked duck, 5,568 loaves of bread, 3,082 free dinners given, 1,083 glasses broken. They were paying $6,000 for a year's worth of rent at the corner of Prince and Wooster in SoHo. (Lucky Jeans has the space today.)

On a related noted, I wrote a piece about art, food, and a few upcoming events in New York that combine the two. Here's the opening, about Marinetti's Futurist war on pasta:

“Pasta, however grateful to the palate, is an obsolete food,” Futurist leader Filippo Marinetti declared in 1931. “Its nutritive qualities are deceptive; it induces skepticism, sloth, and pessimism.” Despite generating considerable debate at the time, Marinetti, of course, lost his war against the Italian staple he claimed to despite photographic evidence that suggested his real feelings about the food were a bit more conflicted.

— "The Art of Eating" at Artinfo