The following piece of mine is in today's Times:

I have never eaten a Velázquez. Or a Picasso, come to that. But I have eaten an Adrià. And it was pretty tasty.

Never heard of the Spanish artist Ferran Adrià? He’s based in Roses, on the Costa Brava. And the reason you might not have heard of him is that he’s usually described as a chef. Not just a chef, mind, but the chef: last month his restaurant, El Bulli, was voted the best in the world by Restaurant magazine. Other chefs refer to him as the greatest.

Next month Adrià will break new ground even for him: he has been invited to exhibit his food at the five-yearly Documentaart show in Kassel, Germany – one of the biggest events in the world of contemporary art. The invitation has, predictably, caused uproar in the art world. José de la Sota, art critic of El PaÍs, put it this way: “Adrià is not Picasso. Picasso did not know how to cook but he was better than Adrià [at art]. What is art now? Is it something or nothing?”

He might indeed ask: many of us have been wondering for quite a while, when we see elephant dung, protest banners and piles of bricks winning art prizes. Clement Greenberg, the most influential critic of modern art, defined it as “the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticise the discipline itself”. That seems to me as good a definition of Adrià’s style of food as any I have read. El Bulli is the home of what has been called “molecular gastronomy”. It opens for six months a year. In the six winter months when it is shut, Adrià and his fellow chefs work in their laboratory in Barcelona, deconstructing and then reassembling food and combinations in all sorts of experimental ways.

The point of Adrià’s food (the same holds for Heston Blumenthal at the Fat Duck in Berkshire) is to remain true to the essence of an ingredient but to let us see it and taste it in a new light. Our expectations are confounded and we see what we are eating in a new way. That is a truly artistic experience. Adrià’s technical skills are unsurpassed and he puts most traditional chefs to shame in his mastery of their techniques. With that as his foundation, he then goes back to the essentials and starts again.

Take the margarita I was offered when I arrived at El Bulli. The “glass” was a square block of ice with a hole in the centre: on top was a foam of olives, with shards of margarita ice underneath. The canapés looked like four biscuits. The Oreo chocolate cream was two pieces of olive biscuit with a yogurt cream, the marshmallow was not coconut but parmesan, and the crunchy rice crispy biscuit was made of quinoa with almonds. Then there was a popcorn foam – literally, foam that tasted of popcorn – accompanied by a tiny ball of caramelised liquid pumpkin dusted with gold leaf. The box of caviar turned out to be intense, tiny balls of jellified melon . . . and on it goes, unexpected dish after logic-questioning dish.

Adrià reacts to the criticism from the Spanish art establishment thus: “True, I am no Picasso, but what is art in times like these? Many people act as if I should apologise for participating. I am not going to. I understand there might be people who are annoyed. It’s tough to see a cook get invited to this. But what is art? If they want to call what I do art, fine. If not, that’s fine too.”

Spot on. In an art world where anything seems to go, I can’t for the life of me see why Ferran Adrià’s food, which fulfils every criterion of modern art, should not take its place alongside the likes of Tracey Emin.

Come to think of it, shouldn’t it be the woman whose contribution to art is an unmade bed whose place in the exhibition should be in question? Why is that art, but Adrià’s not? The food at El Bulli is certainly a lot more elevating to look at.

It's a start.

Only another £412 million to go.

Fun poll at the Rittenhouse Review, for the worst actress in the world:

Madonna Ciccone: 122 votes, or 29%
Melanie Griffith: 68 votes, 16%
Andie MacDowell: 49 votes, 12%
Demi Moore: 46 votes, 11%
Anne Heche: 31 votes, 7%
Julia Roberts: 31 votes, 7%
Other: 30 votes, 7%
Sandra Bullock: 29 votes, 7%
Candace Bergen: 12 votes, 3%
Jane Fonda: 4 votes, 1%

I realise there is a difference between being the worst actress and appearing in the worst films, but Melanie Griffiths has been in two of the worst films ever made - indeed, I would cite them as the two worst films ever made (then again, she was also in the wonderful Something Wild).

The first was called 'A Stranger Among Us', in which she played a tough NYPD cop who goes undercover in the Hassidic community to solve a murder and falls for the Rebbe's son. Truly - albeit unintentionally - hilarious.

Then there was the gloriously awful 'Shining Through', a Nazi thriller in which she played a double, triple, quadruple - I can't remember, I don't want to remember, who the hell cares? - agent, secretary to Michael Douglas' SS villain. The only memory I have of the film was that half an hour in, I suddenly realised I had left my oven on. I rushed home to turn it off (I lived 5 minutes from the cinema) and when I got back asked my friend what had happened. 'Nothing', she replied. 'Can I go and turn your oven back on? It'll keep me occupied'.

Even better, perhaps, is her website. It's beyond parody.

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Forgive such a personal question, but I’m wondering: have your aspirations been impoverished recently? I’m relieved to report that — at least up to my last medical — mine remain fully ished. That’s not, apparently, true for a lot of people. According to the Institute for Public Policy Research, many people experience “poverty of aspiration”. Gosh, it sounds painful. But hurrah! There is a cure! Give them free opera tickets, and all will be dandy.

The Royal Opera House’s decision last week to make available 100 tickets on Monday nights for just £10 — and for good seats, too, not just the back row of the gods — has not had quite the rapturous reception the bigwigs must have expected. Instead of tugging the forelock of the plutocrats in gratitude, the oiks have risen up in rebellion and . . . issued a press release.

Tony Blair’s favourite think tank, the IPPR, complained yesterday that the Royal Opera’s scheme misses the point. “If the arts are to tackle the poverty of aspiration which many people experience, they need to do far more than offer a limited number of cheap tickets on a first-come, first-served basis. Research shows that cost is not the major limiting factor. It would be far better . . . to give away tickets to community groups in deprived areas.”

Well, yes. If you really think it is a fundamental human right to watch Der Rosenkavalier, then I concede we should all work longer hours so we can hand over more tax and pay the Royal Opera to dole out freebie stalls tickets to the Hartlepool Opera Studies Collective. If, on the other hand, you think that opera — and other arts — can be something wonderful and enriching, but is no more a human right than getting a table at Gordon Ramsay’s, then you’ll wonder at the extent to which the subsidy lunatics have already taken over the opera asylum and marvel at their demands for still more power to spend our money on their tastes.

As things stand, a third of the opera house’s £66.2 million annual budget is paid for by the taxpayer (not to mention the £200 million-plus spent on rebuilding the place). It is an obscenity. The Royal Opera is merely one of the most obvious beneficiaries of the giant conspiracy — it’s called arts subsidy — in which the public are forced, under threat of imprisonment, to pay for the pleasures of a tiny minority. Money is taken from taxpayers and used not for defence, not for policing, not for improving the lot of “deprived areas”, but for a new production of The Rape of Lucretia. And it’s justified by baseless assertions that it’s what people really want, if only they realised it.

As it happens, I am one of that minority. I see pretty much everything produced by the Royal Opera. I have yet to have explained to me why my pleasure should be subsidised by a check-out girl in Wigan.

Even with that subsidy, seats at Covent Garden still cost as much as £175. So how are they going to pay for the cheap Monday night tickets? Oh, blissful irony! Thanks entirely to funding by a private company, Travelex. The entire edifice of opera subsidy, supposedly designed to make opera accessible, has had to rely instead on a private company.

That’s because the very notion of accessibility is risible. Ask the people the IPPR wants to be force-fed opera tickets if that’s what they want tax revenue spent on and watch them crease up with laughter. Ask my fellow operagoers why we should have our evenings out subsidised by total strangers and stand back in awe at the self-serving cant which you’ll hear.

And enjoy the irony that this week sees the official opening of the Savoy Opera, just down the road. Seven operas this season, no ticket as much as £50 — and not a penny of subsidy.

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