From: "Nathan P. Myhrvold" To: "Nathan P. Myhrvold" Subject: The Modernist Cuisine Gallery is coming to Las Vegas this May Date: Wed, 01 Mar 2017 16:41:49 +0000 I am opening an art gallery in Las Vegas. That is probably the least likely combination of words for me to ever string together in a sentence. Indeed, if you had asked me about this notion a few years ago, I would have bet big against it. And lost, because this week we are announcing the Modernist Cuisine Gallery, at the Forum Shops at Caesar's Palace. It's amazing how life can take you to completely unexpected places. A series of individually quite reasonable ideas, goals, and facts can utterly transform your context, transporting you to a world where the impossible becomes inevitable. When I decided about a decade ago to create a cookbook, I saw an exciting opportunity to do something new in food photography—to portray food in new and unexpected ways that simultaneously draw readers in and illustrate the science at work in cooking. Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking was a big, crazy bet, as were its two sequels, Modernist Cuisine at Home and The Photography of Modernist Cuisine. But so far about 250,000 copies are in print worldwide across all editions. And the crazy bets keep coming: This autumn we will release my latest cookbook a six-volume, 2,500 page book all about bread. Almost immediately after our first book appeared, people started asking us where they could buy prints of the photos. That seemed like a reasonable enough request, and we did include a few free prints with later books. Our photographs have also been exhibited in art galleries in Le Havre and Hong Kong, as well as in science and food museums across the U.S. My team and I looked into the idea of selling prints, but we honestly struggled with the idea. The marketing and distribution of art is just so damn weird. There is what I call Art with a Capital A—the famous, expensive stuff in fancy galleries