There is a whole other definition I could use when attempting to answer the question of what is art. In Bill Viola’s video installation, Hatsu-Yume (First Dream), 56 minutes of video footage of Asian landscapes and urban settings are pieced together to create an expressive gesture towards the ineffable experience of life, death and material reality. The images and scenes are concrete, as real as anything anyone would witness throughout their day, but they are also rendered strange and illusive through Viola’s visual and audio aesthetics, using such techniques as stillness, movement, refraction, juxtaposition, and chiaroscuro amidst the material properties of the elements of life-- water, air, earth and fire. When aesthetically combined, there’s the experience of slipping into the unnamable when contemplating totality, the ecstatically frightening bewilderment that stands behind the illusion of the visual elements, of our material world. Taken as a whole, art defined as a vehicle towards the sublime, some might say.

However, while this is a vastly different arena than eating at Shopsin’s, similarities which ground the two in Romantic traditions do exist. Shopsin’s restaurant is an onslaught of stimuli, whether it’s profanity, a crude sign about the cooks wearing condoms, or the confrontational attitudes, all are meant to overwhelm and heighten the experience of eating his explosively tasty food. And while you won’t find an outward barrage of devil-may-care fanaticism in Viola, he is equally concerned with putting together powerful segments of video footage which intend to pull you out of yourself and into his theatrical creation, or even the theater of life itself. Both Shopsin and Viola then are aiming for grandeur through the romantic components of nature and our emotions, just going about it in different ways. If there is a difference, its not the components, but the endings. Shopsin has a conquering victory to be gained for himself and his guests: the eating of the food. The romantic hero triumphant with happy taste buds and a stuffed belly. In Viola, it’s the envisioning of the base components of life and the ungraspable mystery behind them, which isn’t romantic, classical, ironic or postmodern, but an art of the spiritual.