A commercial display of baked goods is an art form built on the strategic use of separation.

Example: We step from the mean streets of our little town or big city into a store scented with vanilla, cinnamon and coffee, pull a tiny paper ticket from a stingy red dispenser and read the number that tells us… nothing, really, except that we must be patient. We are. We take our place among the many suitors craning to see the confectionery vision laid before us. Glittering gustatorial gems are staged in Busby Berkeley arrangements on gold foil laminated cardboard platters and white paper doilies.

When we finally reach the front of the line we bend down to peer through the glass encasement—the border fence, the high wall between us and our object of desire. Trays and rows of frosted, sprinkled, drizzled, confettied, and powdered morsels tease our eye and our pallet.

With the ticky-tick of a few computer keys and the swipe of a card, the edible gems are ours! We leave the store with floppy boxes of cupcakes, pockets of pies, carts of cakes, and bags of baguettes. We will have our satisfaction, at last! But wait; this cupcake looks a little anemic. We eat it. Sigh. The icing is too sweet. The cake is stale. The texture isn’t right. And it isn’t as good as the memory of our grandmother’s recipe! We want a replacement. We want something better than the last one. We want the cupcake we were promised.

Does such a cupcake exist? No. Not even in the work of Wayne Thiebaud, the California School pop artist who has painted the glistening surface of commerce for years. His paintings of confections entice, then repel. They draw us in with pinwheeled patterns and swirls; then confound us with opaque canvas and a nubby surface that depicts iced facades as edible as china, sweet as cardboard.

Above: Cakes (1963) Wayne Thiebaud.
Also see a more recent painting of American commerce, Five Rows of Sunglasses (2000)