Published in Art Criticism (Vol. 18, No. 2), 2003
In 2003, Jeffrey Allen Price published The Dialectical Potato: Potato in Art, Art in Potato in Art Criticism (Vol. 18, No. 2), marking one of the earliest formal attempts to trace the potato’s symbolic, cultural, and artistic presence across history.
Drawing connections between ancient Andean agricultural traditions, mythology, religion, folk culture, and contemporary art, the essay examined how the potato repeatedly emerges as a subject of artistic inquiry and symbolic meaning. The text explored works by artists including Vincent van Gogh, Joan Miró, Joseph Beuys, Sigmar Polke, Jörg Immendorff, Victor Grippo, Matthew Barney, and others, while arguing that the potato occupies a unique position as both material object and cultural signifier.
At the center of the essay was a proposition that would continue to shape Price’s work for decades: the potato’s extraordinary ability to move between seemingly contradictory realms of meaning—survival and entertainment, labor and leisure, absurdity and profundity, banality and symbolic depth. Many of the ideas later developed through POTATOISM, Potato Humanities, POTATOPHENA, and the Potato Art Spectrum can be traced to concepts first explored within this text.
The essay also introduced one of the foundational ideas underlying Price’s later research: the potato as more than a subject represented within art, but as a generative force capable of shaping artistic thought itself. In one of its central propositions, the text described the potato as “the origin of the work of art,” suggesting that the cultural, symbolic, and material life of the potato has influenced artistic production in ways that extend far beyond its role as a depicted object.
Today, The Dialectical Potato remains an important foundational document in the development of POTATOISM and the broader intellectual framework that would eventually lead to the establishment of the Think Potato Institute.
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