The Theory on the Process of Art

The process of art is the interpretation of a phenomenon through reflection and transference.

This is the theory most people roll their eyes at. That’s fine. It is also the theory that tells us why we are doing any of this in the first place.

It is a theory about art generally. The fact that we apply it to cocktails is incidental.

What it means

A phenomenon is anything that happened, exists, or has been observed. A memory. A place. A season. A person. A meal. The smell of petrichor on an asphalt road at six in the evening. A piece of music. A specific quality of light at a specific hour.

Reflection is the part where the artist sits with the phenomenon long and hard. What is it made of? What does it feel like? What is its temperature, its texture, its centre of gravity? What does it taste like, in the abstract?

Transference is the part where the artist moves the phenomenon out of its original medium (a memory, a smell, a feeling) and into a different one.

The work, if it’s any good, is not a description of the phenomenon. It is the phenomenon, in a different medium.

The medium is interchangeable

A painter answers the question what does this thing look like in pigment. A composer answers what does this thing sound like. A writer answers what does this thing look like in language. A choreographer answers what does this thing look like in a body moving through space.

The medium changes. The process does not.

Most attempts at art stop one step short of transference. The painter describes what the phenomenon looked like. The composer evokes the mood the phenomenon produced. The writer explains what the phenomenon felt like.

That’s fine. That’s the floor.

But the work that lasts is the work where the phenomenon and the artwork are, in some real sense, the same thing. The painter has not painted a memory of a forest but the forest itself, in pigment. The composer has not written music about grief but grief itself, in sound.

Craft versus art

Every medium has both. They are not the same thing. Most people doing one think they are doing the other.

Craft is the disciplined execution of a known form. A craftsperson knows the rules, hits the rules, and produces good work reliably. Most professional output, in every field, is craft. Most of it should be. The world does not need fewer well-made things.

Art is what happens when somebody stops executing the form and starts answering the question. The work might still look like the form, a song or a painting or a drink, but the process is no longer "make a song" or "make a painting." It is what does this phenomenon want to be.

Both are valuable. Both are honourable. They are simply doing different work.

Where this lands, eventually

Eventually you have to make the thing.

The painter has to pick up the brush. The composer has to write the first bar. The bartender, and yes, we get there eventually, has to pour the first ingredient into the mixing glass.

At The Spiffy Dapper, we aim for craft as the floor. Every drink should be well-made, balanced, and recognisable as the form it claims to be. Beyond that, the bartenders are encouraged to do art: to take a phenomenon and move it into the glass.

This is why bartenders here are allowed to make the drinks they want to make rather than the drinks we tell them to make. A bartender executing somebody else’s vision is doing craft. A bartender executing their own is doing art. The drinks come out better: sometimes weirder, sometimes worse, but always more honest.

A note on failure

Most attempts at art fail. We are at peace with this.

The point of treating the work as art is not that every piece succeeds. It is that the ones that do, work for a reason, and the maker knows what the reason is.