Cooking is an Art

A new restaurant:

It reads:

Cooking is an art. Cooking is not about construction, it's about flavor. You have to have sensitivity to the food, intuition. Without that, you are just a technician, you have nothing to say. A cook is an instrument of nature.

With apologies to the chef, who I am sure is very talented, the usual purpose of a manifesto is to espouse radical ideas that are in opposition to the common view. Would anyone really disagree that cooking is "an art?" Are there armies of restaurateurs afoot who believe that cooking is not an art? (A science?) Why would anyone want to eat in a place where the preparers of food do not consider their work an art? Surely even fast food manufacture is an art of sorts that is analogous to futurism or pop art.

The real question, therefore, is what kind of art? This food, we learn, is not "about construction," but it is "about flavor." (But how can an artist avoid building anything, and what is construction if not art?) Since flavor is already present in the natural environment, I will presume they want their food to be a kind of found art. If the trend is for the most expensive restaurants to use local and seasonal ingredients, does this mean we want food to come directly from the farm to the table, with minimal adornment and little art? And if a cook is "an instrument" of nature, then really what we are talking about is not art, but religion. This type of cooking would have an affinity with one or more spiritual traditions whose practitioners aspire to commune with the natural or mystical world. I don't have enough information from the sign to know if they are talking about paganism or Bhuddism or Sufism, but it sounds like it will be tasty.