Does a wedding cake qualify as art?
Next landmark gay rights ruling in the United States hinges on surprising question
WASHINGTON— Duff Goldman knows cake art.
Since launching Charm City Cakes in 2002, the Ace of Cakes star has sold tens of thousands of fantastical, towering tiers of goodness: former president Barack Obama’s 2012 inauguration cake, a Hogwarts Harry Potter cake, a pair of Smurf cakes, even a life-size NASCAR cake.
By any conventional standard, Goldman is an artist when it comes to cake. And he’s willing and able to make anything. Well, almost anything. “There was one time someone wanted something really obscene,” says Goldman. “They wanted their wedding cake to include a sex toy.”
This posed a dilemma: Not a moral issue, per se, but one of good taste. “I sat them down and said, ‘Listen, it’s great you are who you are, but your grandma is going to be there,’ ” he says. The couple reconsidered, and the cake displayed at the wedding reception was more romantic than raunchy. “But if they had insisted, I would have made it for them.”
Is Goldman really an artist? Or is he just a really good baker?
That’s the question of the moment in the world of cake decorating, thanks to the Masterpiece Cakeshop case coming to the U.S. Supreme Court next week.
In 2012, Charlie Craig and David Mullins walked into the small bakery in Lakewood, Colo., looking for a wedding cake. Owner Jack Phillips, by all accounts a very talented cake decorator, told the gay couple that he couldn’t make it because it would violate his religious beliefs.
The couple went to the Colorado Civil Rights Division, which accused Phillips of discrimination based on sexual orientation. Now lawyers will argue whether Phillips’ edible artistry is protected under the First Amendment — cakes as his form of free speech — or if it’s just, well, cake. The intersection of cake and art Anyone who’s spent any time around cake decorators or watched cake competitions on television knows the crazy amount of time, talent and detail that go into making some of these creative confections.
Rebekah Wilbur, managing editor of American Cake Decorating magazine and owner of a custom-cake business in Virginia, knows a lot of cake designers, including herself, who are “fiercely protective of the idea that they are artists,” she says.
At the same time, many of these artists are also business owners and have strong feelings about turning away customers based on any personal beliefs.
“We all share a common passion, but behind that are so many divisions — both political and religious,” explains Wilbur, who says that the Masterpiece Cakeshop case has been “very divisive in the industry.” The legal question Everyone in the industry has been following the case, and a number of amicus curiae briefs have been submitted to the court supporting either Phillips or the couple.
One influential brief signed by 222 celebrity bakers and chefs maintains that no food, not even dishes prepared by a three-star chef, is art or protected by the First Amendment.
Goldman, maybe the most famous cake decorator in the country, wrote an essay in People magazine last month arguing that what he creates is not really art.
“It’s cake,” he reasserts in an interview. “I make art out of a cake, but at the end of the day it’s a cake. It’s dessert.”
“I make art out of a cake, but at the end of the day it’s a cake.” DUFF GOLDMAN STAR, ACE OF CAKES
When it’s OK to refuse to bake No baker, of course, can be forced to create anything a customer requests. Phillips says that he “honours God” with his cakes and doesn’t sell any with alcohol, with a Halloween theme or celebrating divorce.
And that’s OK, says Human Rights Campaign legal director Sarah Warbelow. “As long as Jack is refusing to provide a service to anyone who walks through the door, that’s fine,” she says.
Phillips, however, was selling wedding cakes to opposite-sex couples but not same-sex couples, which violates public accommodation laws that prevent discrimination.
Phillips decided to stop making custom wedding cakes, which he says cut his business by 40 per cent.