One Aldwych, London holds a collection of four hundred artworks featuring “the most compelling modern British artists.”
Inspired by this collection, The Lobby Bar team collaborated with cocktail connoisseur, Marcis Dzelzainis, to produce The Gallery Menu. Together they have seemingly unearthed the essence of these artworks, translating them into something we can taste.
Tasting the very essence of the artwork while viewing it, experiencing not only through sight but also through flavour, could this practice finally achieve the absolute immersion sought by curators?
Discovering The Gallery Menu allowed me to reflect on alcohol culture and its association with the arts. We are constantly reinventing ways to serve alcohol. Take The Alchemist, for instance; it is theatrical, an act, where the consumer is subject to a show of cocktail shaking and assembling before they can enjoy their drink.
Are these art-influenced cocktails an artistic breakthrough? Or do they simply demonstrate the need for culture and heritage to be reinvented for younger audiences; a sales pitch to keep arts and culture on the map?
Do these luxury custom cocktails reaffirm that the culture of art is in danger of being forgotten, becoming obsolete? Or are they merely a product of our ever-evolving society, reinvention for the sake of change, a new trend?
The Gallery Menu: artistic innovation or a blatant reminder of all-consuming alcohol culture?
You decide.