ART / Cathy Curtis : There Might Be Too Much Food for Thought in Restaurant Art

“I’ll have the arugula salad, the sea bass in raspberry sauce and a bottle of number 14, the sauvignon blanc. Oh, and could you tell me the price of that painting hanging over there?”

Welcome to the wonderful world of restaurant art. We’re not talking about the discreet landscapes that used to hang on the flocked wallpaper in stuffy expensive restaurants. The new restaurant art is hip and stylish, meant to harmonize with hip and stylish decors and menus. Such firms as Irvine-based Arteffects have sprung up to handle the needs of restaurateurs who agree that art is a plus but haven’t the time or expertise to round up the work themselves.

But what kind of attention is art likely to get in a place where people come in pairs and groups purely to amuse themselves? Should an artist who produces serious work agree to show it in an environment where looking at art is clearly secondary to eating and socializing? Isn’t that like being hired to play in a string quartet at a party where people are talking so loudly they can’t hear the music?

Bistango, a restaurant in Irvine, recently returned a couple of large paintings by Frank Dixon that had attracted negative comments by patrons. The paintings are “Remember Who Loved Ya Baby,” an image of a devil in a business suit, and “Nancy,” in which Nancy Reagan poses in an open white fur coat, in front of a row of red rockets.

(A third painting, returned to the artist but never hung, is “Domestic Skeleton,” the image of a skeleton grinning ghoulishly as he jams a knife into a red tomato, against a background of falling green fruit.)

One family announced it was leaving because it objected to the paintings, and several people reportedly complained that the works--which hung over the bar--were ugly and didn’t belong in a restaurant. So Bistango owner John Ghoukassian (who had helped select Dixon’s work in the first place) conferred with his Los Angeles partner and they decided to send the devil packing, along with “Nancy” and the skeleton.

In place of these paintings, the restaurant has chosen two from Dixon’s “TV Series,” one of which depicts a scene the artist describes as “a lone guy in ecstasy facing a TV set with an animal cowering in the corner.” Other paintings by the Costa Mesa artist that remain at the restaurant (through May 20) are equally satirical treatments of the jaded, fast-track behavior of people who have made it--people from the same echelon as at least some of the restaurant’s patrons. But apparently those images are not quite as easy for diners and drinkers to pigeonhole and reject.

Dixon, who says he no longer tries to explain the themes of his work, reports that even people who buy it sometimes tell him they aren’t sure why. Or they’ll buy a painting, “put it in their closet and 2 years later come creeping up to me an an opening and say, ‘You know that piece? Well, I knew there was something (intriguing) about it, but I couldn’t live with it.’ ”

One argument for placing art in restaurants is that many patrons probably don’t go to art galleries or museums, so this is a painless way to expose works to new audiences. And surely no one would begrudge an artist any sales that might result from showing in restaurants. (One of Dixon’s paintings is “on hold” for a potential buyer, and a piece by Duncan Simcoe, whose figurative work is on view, has sold).

But a restaurant is simply not an environment conducive to the close looking that serious work requires, whether it is abstract or figurative, emotional or dryly theoretical, socially involved or dependent purely on perceptual qualities.

Some trendy eateries are noisy and bustling, places to see and be seen. Others are hushed and intimate. But the focus is always on people and food. Art is no more than an accouterment brought in to help create a pleasing ambiance. Any restaurateur worth his salt wants above all to keep his patrons happy.

It’s no wonder, then, that most “art” you see at restaurants is little more than the visual equivalent of small talk. There’s no need to pay more than glancing attention to it because there’s no depth there anyway.

But real art--the serious, important kind of art--is not about making people instantly feel happy and comfortable. The art may ultimately yield some kind of sensual, intellectual or spiritual pleasure, but first the viewer has to spend “quality time” with it. That means being undistracted by food or conversations or wondering if the couple at the far table is looking your way.

So it isn’t surprising that major artists rarely show their work at restaurants. One of the more pungent responses to the art-in-restaurants question belongs to Mark Rothko, whose nine Seagram Murals were commissioned in the late 1950s for the posh Four Seasons restaurant in New York’s Seagram Building.

The artist--known for his paintings of subtle, deeply expressive, luminous fields of color--ultimately decided that the restaurant was too crass an environment for his work and forbade the installation of the large abstract murals. (In 1969 he donated them to the London’s Tate Museum, and they were recently shown at the Tate Gallery of the North, in Liverpool.)

While the murals were still in progress, Rothko was quoted as saying, “I hope to paint something that will ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room. If the restaurant would refuse to put up my murals, that would be the ultimate compliment.”

Granted Rothko’s well-documented curmudgeonly temperament--and the fact that he had accepted the commission in the first place--there is a prickly merit in his point of view. He didn’t want his work to compete with other activities for attention. And he was willing to give up “exposure” to retain the purity of the encounter between the viewer and his art.

Although Dixon has also shown his work at a trendy restaurant in Los Angeles (where people also complained about the subject matter) and a San Diego cafe, he says he’s “in a holding pattern,” and not sure whether he’ll pursue this route in the future.

When he looks at other people’s art, however, he says, “I demand the privacy to be with stuff. It’s important space to have.”