ABSTRACT
The months before the exhibition opened were extraordinarily hectic. There had been a sense of working at high pace against an impending deadline for much but things moved up another gear. In some respects the making of the exhibition seemed to follow the classical structure of a rite of passage as set out by Van Gennep: ritualised separation, followed by a transitional or liminal period, and then, often the high point in ritual terms, a ceremonial reincorporation in which a new life-phase and status are marked. In some respects the gallery’s ‘completion’ is a fiction and the opening ceremony a ritual punctuation of a process that might otherwise have no clear end-point. The Foodies frequently complained that the reviews were ‘unfair’, that they had ‘missed the point’ of what the exhibition was trying to do, that the reviewers had failed to ‘read it properly’, and pointed to aspects of the exhibition or even areas where supposed omissions were mentioned.
