SAIC = the School of Art Institute of Cupcake

The opening of this year's BFA show was a treat. I get I get to see the work of many of my students in the graphic, painterly, performative craft, and insanely clever ways you can only hope for. I get to meet people's parents and partners, which illuminates and fulfills base-level curiosities in equal measure. . I could mention my former student Mark and his apparent flying mountain project, in Second Life and embodied. Or all the tinsel that C. found herself swimming through at one point in a exhibit of works in glass.

Their are too many interesting things to potentially talk about, so I won't talk about them all at risk of saying too little about any one thing. Instead, just one observation. About: cupcakes.

Cupcakes are in. We knew about this as exclusive cupcake bakeries proliferated over the last couple years, from the west, to the midwest, and of course, the east. I've eaten some of these cupcakes, and I tell you, they are good. I myself have taken to making brownies in the shape of cupcakes because they seem more delicious that way. There was the band Cake, and then Cake on Cake, so it is only natural that given current interest in cupcakes that there is a band named that too. They have even made it into the obscure but thriving market of Rebus dishware. I can attest to this because I was given the plate below just this Christmas by my brother.

It was only a matter of time then that cupcakes made there way to the fine art world. On the first floor of the BFA show C. and I came across this very elaborate cupcake wall display. Cupcakes were for the taking, as were the toppings. Whipped cream on top of your already frosted cupcake? Yes, anything is possible. Is this sort of a 'sweetened relational aesthetics' in the spirit of Rirkrit Tiravanija kind of thing?

As much as cupcakes are in, though, there is also the possibility of simply being in a cupcake! And so why not do that. Why not have three of you in your underwear sit within a huge pink-frosted chocolate cupcake and hang out and eat and call the piece "Ms. Otis regrets she will be unable to lunch today"? You can have your (cup)cakes and eat them too quite simultaneously, then perhaps even go for the Guinness Book of World Record's to boot. Whatever feminist critique may or may not be happening here, it was a popular spectacle and I suspect only the beginning of a more extensive snack cake discourse/consumption looming on the horizon.