Not Just Desserts

Artnews

Will Cotton has painted landscapes of sweets for more than a decade. But in 2009 he turned his attention to actual confections, opening a temporary bakery inside the retail space Partners & Spade in New York. Cotton and his assistants (who wore cupcake tiaras) filled the store with lemon and gingerbread macaroons, butter cream-topped cupcakes, apple-caramel tarts, chocolate-raspberry treats, and fluffy pink-frosted cakes (matching the cotton-candy clouds of the artist's paintings). At prices ranging from $2 for the macaroons to $30 for the cakes, the treats quickly sold out. Cotton also displayed sculptures of piled-up imitation cakes, ornately "frosted" using acrylic in pastry bags, which were not for sale (his paintings go for $50,000 to $250,000 at Mary Boone Gallery in New York). "Eating other foods may be pleasurable, but cake is extraordinary in that it exists only for pleasure-there's no nutritional reason to eat it," says Cotton. "And that's why I find it so intriguing and wonderful."

Cotton is not the only one fascinated by cakes. Cake in an artist's hands can become anything from a nonedible sculpture to a quickly devoured dessert, from an object of beauty to a symbol of gluttony. For some artists, cakes evoke powerful childhood memories, and for others, they become the basis for adult art happenings.