When LA MOCA's head honcho, Jeffrey Deitch, commissioned Marina Abramovic, to design the Museum's annual fundraising gala this month, her resultant fete did not feature the usual rubber chicken fricasse, foul amuse bouches and snooze-button toasts. Instead, Marina opted to spice things up.  

Abramovic's gala-as-art experience included human centerpieces lying butt-naked and Brazilian-waxed beneath plastic skeletons or rotating about disembodied on dais-hidden Lazy Susans (see below). Not to mention the piece de resistance: two, life-sized cakes of Debbie Harry (the evening's musical entertainment) and Ms. Abramovic, both of whom were frosted nude, provoking the crowd of art collectors, donors, and other society folk to clamor for a knifed-off slice of nippled fondant.

Whether or not Abramovic's table-clothed (and unclothed) provocations staged in such a moneyed context smacked of good or bad taste has already been widely discussed on the webs, owing of course to choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer's already infamous and delightfully acerbic letter to Deitch denouncing the gala and the museum's meager compensation of the evening's performers as a "grotesque spectacle" intent only on "titillation for wealthy diners."

Criticisms aside, the Abramovic cake massacre (along with Greg Allen's super-smart lecture and post on the gala-as-art movement) got me thinking about the most deliciously absurd gala digestibles of recent history. Feast on this...

​“An Artist’s Life Manifesto” at LACMA.

​“An Artist’s Life Manifesto” at LACMA.

​“An Artist’s Life Manifesto” at LACMA.

Jennifer Rubell's Padded Cell for Performa's Red Party (2010)

Most of the art circuit's current obsession with high-concept food is largely indebted to the comedic genius of food artist Jennifer Rubell. One might imagine, growing up as she did in the household responsible for the Rubell Family Collection, the young Rubell had her fill of lukewarm salmon and has henceforth made a career out of turning up the heat on blue-blooded banquets.

Her Pepto-Bismol-colored mental asylum chamber pictured above, built for the performance art nonprofit Performa and its Russian constructivist-themed party, was padded with 1,800 cotton candy bricks, symbolizing something-something about "an all-American funhouse that is at the same time confining, threatening, claustrophobic." 

The actress Anne Hathaway, however—one of the guests held captive in this chamber of spun insanity—found the experience akin to her memory of a college foam party, in which many of the co-eds contracted pink eye. 

Rubell's Cheese Heads for Brooklyn Museum's Ball (2010)

As a homage to Bruce Nauman's hanging wax heads—but also reminiscent of Janini Antoni's "Lick and Lather" busts of chocolate and soap—Rubell cast seven sculptures of her head in fontina cheese for the Brooklyn Ball and tied them up to the ceiling with strategically aimed heat guns, positioning the heads above a pile of crackers to catch the Velveeta-esque droplets of oozy whiz as it melted off the heads.

Rubell's production also featured dirty martini spigots, Mario Batalli live-carving rabbits, Vito Acconci carrot phalluses, and a ritualistic destruction of a super-sized Andy Warhol piñata.  

Matthew Barney and Elizabeth Peyton's Blood For Two, Deste Foundation (2009)

In celebration of his Deste Foundation, Greek tycoon Dakis Joannou shipped hundreds of who's who to the isle of Hydra, where everyone had to wake up at dawn to watch a bunch of local fishermen dredge up a 750-pound glass-and-bronze coffin holding a Peyton-rendered portrait of Matthew Barney with a dead dogfish shark on top and haul it up the Aegean cliffs with aid of a donkey cart. The procession wound up at an old slaughterhouse, where the coffin was cranked open, seawater rushed down the butcher's blood drains, and the portrait was revealed to be intact, at which point Peyton cryptically whispered to Barney, "They're still there...the cat looks good."

I have no idea what any of this signified, but afterwards 300 people sat at a really long table and ate the sacrificial shark, which reportedly tasted like chicken.  

Chef Matthew Weingarten's Intuitive Antipasto for Performa's Futurist Banquet (2009)

Performa's Futurist Banquet recreated dishes from the Italian artist and poetF.T. Marinetti's Futurist Cookbook, including cubist crudite, courses accompanied by spritzes of perfumed rose water or colored mood-lighting changes, elaborate jello bombs disintegrating into food fights, and this antipasti cupped in orange rinds and topped off with Marinetti-scribed manifesto-y incitements such as, "We regard art critics as useless and dangerous." Upon completing their antipasti, guests were instructed to shout their fortunes in an uproar of aesthetic revolt while Jerry Saltz looked on.   

Takashi Murakami Placemats for LA MOCA and Brooklyn Museum (2007 and 2008)

As Abramovic's gala suggests, the art world cares less about the grub and more about the tablescapes. So affirms the Murakami-themed raves of 2007 and 2008 when the Louis Vuitton gift-shopped carnival of © MURAKAMI went coast to coast. These limited-edition, fiberglass Murakami plates caused a minor furor in LA when model Naomi Campbell tried to nab the swag from other diners' place settings under the reasoning that she needed a full set. (The designer Tom Ford told her to do it.) 

When the circus arrived in Brooklyn, guests were red-carpeted through a metal-shuttered mock Chinatown where fake counterfeit Louis Vuitton hawkers sold real Murakami bags and Sabrett hot dog carts were repurposed to vendor champagne. But inside, it was the same plastic-plate squabble. Like Naomi before her, Jamie Snow, the wife of Brooklyn's Borough President Marty Markowitz, wanted to capitalize on her swag, too, gathering up other guests' placemats for herself.

When gala-goers complained, Snow remarked, "You guys really should have acted faster. This is Brooklyn."

Photos (respectively): Another Magazine, Tumblr, the Los Angeles Times, Jennifer Rubell, Cremaster Fanatic, the New York Times, and the Gowanus Lounge.