“Art and Scent: Interpreting the Olfactory Arts,” Invited lecture given at MACRO (Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma), Rome, September 14, 2019. (The original lecture had many more illustrations; the version below has only images taken by the author.)
Over the last two decades the natural and human sciences have positively reappraised the value of smell and at the same time there has been a flourishing of the use of smell in a wide variety of arts. It is time for aesthetics and art theory to take notice of both these changes, and especially, of the many kinds of remarkable art works addressed to our sense of smell.
Part I. Kinds of Olfactory Arts
A. Works for Art Museums and Galleries. Otobong Nkanga’s Anamnesis, shown at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art in 2018, is a long freestanding white wall, with a dark, river-like incision running around it at nose level. She filled the incision with aromatic coffee beans, chopped tobacco leaves, cloves and other spices of the kind that had been exploited in the African colonial trade. As visitors walked along smelling the brown slash, they were given a palpable experience of Nkanda’s anti-colonial message.
Christophe Laudamiel’s “Over 21” offered visitors to a New York gallery a very different kind of olfactory experience. Laudamiel had placed ten canisters of synthetic scents he had created around a dining table; they bore names like Sweat or Sex? or Secret Grass. At the exhibit opening, visitors dipped perfume blotters into a small hole in the top of each canister, inhaled scents and wrote down their reactions.
Peter de Cupere’s Tree Virus, consisted of a large ball of peppermint and white pepper with a dead tree sitting on top of it. The odor was so pungent that many of the people who went inside the igloo-like structure to see and smell Tree Virus, quickly ran out again, their eyes burning.
In 2015 the Tinguely Museum of Basel presented a survey of over 60 such olfactory art works by artists past and present in “Belle Haleine-The Art of Scent.”
But museum and gallery works like these are not the only kinds of contemporary olfactory arts.
B. Odors are being used to enhance works of theater and music, such as the French drama Parfums de l’ame of 2012 that released a dozen strategic scents from beneath theater seats, or Green Aria: A Scent Opera presented in 2009 at the Guggenheim that combined electronic music with 30 odors to narrate an environmental message.
C. Meanwhile, designers have been using smells to create everything from signature scents for hotel chains like Westin and Marriott to fabrics with embedded fragrances.
D. Nor must we forget perfume and incense—the most ancient olfactory arts.
E. Finally, some scholars include works of literature, music, or painting that only represent odors and the sense of smell, such as Italo Calvino’s, “Il Nome, Il Naso,” Claude Debussy’s opera, Pelléas et Mélisande, or Duccio’s painting The Resurrection of Lazarus that shows a figure just to the right of center, dressed in a yellow cloak, holding his nose at the stench.
F. Scope of “Olfactory Art”
Current critical opinion is divided over how many of these practices should be included under the title “olfactory art.” Both the art historian Francesca Bacci and the philosopher, Chantal Jaquet, define olfactory art broadly to include most of the types I just mentioned. But the leading art critic and curator of olfactory art, Jim Drobnick, restricts the meaning of the term “olfactory art” to the first type, that is, hybrid works that combine scents with sculpture, installations and other visual art media intended for art galleries and museums.
Although I personally agree with Bacci and Jaquet in accepting a broader definition of the term “olfactory arts,” especially when the term is used in the plural, since this lecture is for an art museum audience, I will not discuss the use of odors to enhance theater, music, or film, nor will I discuss the representation of odors in literature, music and painting. If you are interested in those topics, I have dealt with them at length in my book, Art Scents: Exploring the Aesthetics of Smell and the Olfactory Arts that will be published in early 2020 by Oxford University Press.
The focus of this evening’s lecture, then, will be on olfactory art works that are intended for galleries and museums and that intentionally use actual odors in a prominent way. In the last part of the lecture I will briefly compare contemporary artists’ perfume-like works with commercial perfumes.
But before addressing those topics, I need to confront some of the reasons that the idea of using odors in art works presents challenges to audiences.
Part II. Challenges to Audiences
A. Westerners’ Low Estimate of the Sense of Smell.
Most of us hardly pay attention to the odors around us and when people are asked which of the senses they would give up, if they had to, they often name smell. Indeed, in an era when we spend so much of our time staring at our cell phones, notepads, and computers, it might seem that vision and hearing are gaining an even greater hold over our daily lives at the expense of smell, taste, and touch.
Yet, paradoxically, most of our foods and household products are scented and many stores and hotels now use ambient odors to create atmosphere. Indeed, some of the same international corporations that produce commercial perfumes actually gain much of their income from making artificial flavors for foods, and fragrances for soaps, toothpastes, shampoos, etc. Even our digital devices may eventually be programmed to emit odors of our choosing. Yet, the possibility that our cell phones, notepads and computers will one day allow us to send each other odor messages may depend less on the success of the inventors, than on whether they can overcome the public’s lack of interest.
B. A Negative Intellectual Tradition
Many scientists and theorists of the past such as Darwin and Freud, have disdained smell as the least useful and most animalistic of the senses, viewing it as a kind of pre-human vestige in the course of disappearing. Good for Neanderthals, perhaps, but no longer needed by Homo sapiens. Darwin wrote: “smell is of extremely slight service, if any, even for savages.”
When it comes to aesthetics and art theory, there is also a negative intellectual tradition reaching from Kant and Hegel to contemporary philosophers who claim that odors and the sense of smell cannot possibly be the basis for genuine art works or aesthetic experiences.
C. The “Deodorization” of Western Cities
A third reason for the neglect of smell is that since the 18th century most middle and upper class people in the West have lived in areas of cities from which many once noticeable odors have been eliminated —except, of course, for auto exhaust or when the garbage collectors go on strike. From the Ancient world down to the nineteenth century, smells in general and perfume and incense in particular played a much more important role in medicine, social life and religion than they do today.
Part III. The Sensory Revolution in the Sciences
But, beginning in the 1980s and accelerating in this century, both the sciences and the humanistic disciplines have rediscovered the positive value of the sense of smell.
A. Biology
In biology, the rediscovery of the importance of smell began in the 1980s with the exploration of the dominant role of retronasal smell in the brain’s construction of flavor.
The term “retronasal smell” refers to the way odor molecules from our food reach our nasal receptors via an opening at the back of our mouths. Thus, there are two kinds of smell. “Orthonasal smell” occurs when odors enter our nostrils from outside. “Retronasal smell” occurs when odors reach our nasal receptors from inside. Our brains almost instantly combine the information from these two sources to produce the experience of flavor. Biologists and psychologists estimate that up to 80% of what we experience as the flavor of our food actually comes from retronasal smell and not from taste buds (which register only sweet, sour, salt, bitter, and umami). You can test this yourself by biting into a strawberry or other flavorful food while holding your nose.
B. Neuroscience and Psychology
Although many psychologists stress that the sense of smell is more emotional than cognitive and that most Westerner’s have difficulty correctly naming odors, other psychologists stress that humans are excellent at detecting smells and can quickly learn new ones.
For example, humans can detect as little as one part per billion of mercapan, the chemical that is put into odorless natural gas to aid in discovering leaks. One part per billion is equivalent to three drops of wine in an Olympic size swimming pool.
Other studies have shown that when given pieces of clothing recently worn by several different individuals, most people can easily pick out a piece that has been worn by a family member or a close friend.
In a more amusing experiment, psychologists have demonstrated that humans wearing knee-pads are quite good at tracking smells while crawling through grass and can improve with practice.
Finally, several psychologists who study long-term memory have confirmed the insight of Marcel Proust and other writers that smells have an exceptional power to evoke vivid and emotion-laden memories from childhood.
C. History, Anthropology, Linguistics
At the same time that biology and psychology have been reappraising the powers of human smell, historians, as we noted, have demonstrated the crucial role that smell has played in the past.
Anthropologists have shown that smell still plays a pervasive role in many small-scale societies outside the West. In one such society, for example, the yearly calendar is named for the smell of various plants that come into bloom at different times.
Finally, linguists have shown that several non-Western societies have developed abstract odor vocabularies that allow ordinary people to quickly identify, name, and discuss smells.
When we combine these recent discoveries of historians, anthropologists, and linguists, with the new evidence from biology and psychology of smell’s powers and importance in daily life, the negative views of Darwin and Freud that were so influential until the beginning of this century now seem completely out of date. As the neuroscientist Gordon Shepherd has written: “Rather than being weak and vestigial, human smell appears to be quite powerful.”
Part IV. The Sensory Revolution in the Arts
Given the positive reappraisal of the sense of smell by the sciences and humanistic disciplines, it is no surprise that visual artists have also been rediscovering the powers of smell since the 1980s
A. “Post-Medium” and “Conceptual.”
Looked at historically, contemporary visual artists’ use of odors in their works now seems like an inevitable outcome of what have been called the “post-medium” and “conceptual” turns in the visual arts since the 1960s, when movements like Arte Povera here in Italy or Neo-Dada in the United States, began to use all sorts of unconventional materials from fat and felt to blood and dirt to make art that emphasized ideas rather than formal beauty. In a 1975 installation, for example, Bill Viola placed a pungent smelling pot of boiling eucalyptus leaves in front of a video of a woman dropping eucalyptus leaves into a similar pot of boiling water, an ingenious provocation to think about smell in comparison to vision. In a 1980 work, the Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles’ had visitors enter a darkened room where there was a single candle burning on a table, but there was also the smell of natural gas that suggested the place might blow up at any moment.
B. Critics Discover the “Olfactory Arts”
By the 1990s there were enough such works in which smell was intentionally prominent that the term “olfactory art” came to be a focus of discussion by several critics and curators, such as the Canadian, Jim Drobnick. Drobnick argued that most olfactory artworks intended for galleries and museums are “hybrids,” that is, they are combinations of scents with some other established visual art form.
To give you an idea of the great variety of olfactory art works made for galleries and museums, here is a partial list with an example of each.
C. Types of Olfactory Art
1. Hybrids of Odors with Paint. Although there are few artists who combine traditional figurative or abstract paintings with actual smells, several artists have encapsulated odors in special paints that can be spread on gallery walls where the scent is released when someone touches the wall. Sissel Tolaas used this procedure for her work called The Fear of Smell and the Smell of Fear. Tolaas collected sweat samples from nine men subject to anxiety attacks and encapsulated them in paint and visitors released each odor in turn as they moved along touching the walls.
2. Scent Sculptures.
Many olfactory artists have combined scents with sculptural forms. Among the best-known scent sculptures are those of Ernesto Neto, such as Mother Body Densities, in which huge Lycra sacks, filled with aromatic spices, are hung from a gallery ceiling. Their aroma often pervades an entire museum.
3. Scent Installations.
Jannis Kounellis, who, as most of you know, lived and worked in Rome until his death , created an olfactory installation in 2001 called Untitled consisting of hanging steel trays filled with ground coffee beans that gave off a rich odor as one walked among them.
4. Perfume-like works.
I say “perfume-like” to emphasize that these are singular works and are not intended by the artist to be sold for wearing. A number of contemporary artists have created perfume-like works, which often involve unpleasant body odors of some kind, such as Clara Ursitti’s Eau Clair, based on her own body odors, including vaginal smells.
5. Scent Performances. Most performance art is highly public, such as Angela Ellsworth’s wearing a black cocktail dress soaked in her own urine to another artist’s opening, but there are also less malodorous and less public performances such as Rachel Morrison’s Smelling the Books in which she set about systematically smelling each of the books in the Museum of Modern Art library and recording her impressions.
6. Atmospheres. These are works where odors are diffused into a largely empty gallery space. In Maki Ueda’s Invisible White the empty gallery is semi-dark and you can barely see so that your senses automatically switch to smell, touch and hearing to get oriented.
7. Scent Organs. The idea of creating a keyboard instrument that would release scents and scent combinations has been around since the nineteenth century, but it is only in this century that at least three successful scent organs have been constructed by or for artists. The most recent and versatile is Wolfgang Georgsdorf’s Smeller 2.0 an enormous machine with 64 pipes that can be computer programmed to play innumerable combinations. It can also be played spontaneously from a keyboard to accompany poetry, music, or film, something Georgsdorf did in a 2016 weeklong festival in Berlin.
Part V. Is “Olfactory Art” a Coherent Category?
There are three kinds of evidence that the term “olfactory art” actually names a category with enough cohesion to be added to our vocabulary of the arts.
A. History
As often happens with new movements in the arts, historians soon discover more distant precedents. The art historian Caro Verbeek has found a forerunner of olfactory art fifty years earlier than Arte Povera and Neo-Dada: Italian Futurism. In 1911, for example, Carlo Carra issued a manifesto calling for “La Pittura dei Suoni, Rumori, Odori.” Cara was not thinking of “representing” smells in the way Duccio did in the Risurrezione di Lazzaro, but of the painter finding in smells and sounds an impetus to use the arabesques and vectors of force that came to typify Futurist paintings. Ennio Valentinelli’s Futurist manifesto l’Arte degli Odori of 1916 called for a more general embrace of the smells of everyday life: “We must refine our nostrils. We have to start conquering the senses that have been elusive till now . . . We have to force the reluctance of the senses when it comes to stench . . . .”[1] Valentinelli’s call to overcome our reluctance to embrace stenches is close to the ideas of several contemporary olfactory artists such as Sissel Tolaas. Another Futurist manifesto, Fedel Azari’s, La Flora Futurista of 1924, called for replacing natural flowers with artificial ones and suffusing them with perfumes, a kind of scent sculpture.
B. Advantages of Using Odors in Art Works
Artists and critics have identified several advantages of using odors to make art works
1. The first advantage is that the volatility of odors requires the audience to be physically present and engages them directly.
2. Second, many contemporary artists are drawn to smell because odors and scents arouse strong, highly personal emotional associations.
3. Third, the supposed “animality” of the sense of smell and its close association with our basic bodily functions makes odors an ideal expressive medium for artists interested in identity and sexuality.[2] This is clearly the case with the perfume-like works such as Clara Ursitti’s Eau Claire.
4. Fourth, some artists see the very difficulty of exhibiting, selling, and preserving something so intangible and fleeting as odors as one of their advantages for making art. [3]
C. Some Olfactory Artists
Another kind of evidence that the term “olfactory art” names a useful category is that there are a number of artists who publicly identify themselves as olfactory or scent artists. Here are a few.
1. The Norwegian born Sissel Tolaas, who created The Smell of Fear and the Fear of Smell, has a background in both chemistry and art and her laboratory/studio in Berlin contains an archive of thousands of smell samples, ranging from dog feces and banana peels to essential oils and synthetic scent molecules. Tolaas’ mission is to get people to appreciate their own body odors as well as the odors of their everyday environment. Most typical of her art and advocacy work are her smell profiles of various cities around the world; she has done over 35, some at the request of city officials, and these often result in artworks, such as the four scents she synthesized for the Berlin Biennale of 2004, each representing a quadrant of the city. For Tolaas as for the Futurist, Valentinelli, there are no intrinsically “bad” smells, only a world full of thousands of complex and interesting odors waiting to be discovered. She is a kind of John Cage of smell.
2. The French perfumer-artist Christophe Laudamiel is a multi-faceted creator, who has designed perfumes for major fashion and cosmetic companies and ambient odors for stores such as Armani, as well as creating 30 abstract odors for Green Aria: A Scent Opera. In addition to art installations using perfume-like works such as the exhibition “Over 21,” he has regularly shown other olfactory works at the New York and Berlin art galleries that represent him. Whereas some artists say they use odors because olfactory works are not easily archived and resist being bought and sold, Laudamiel has created devices that make it easier for dealers and collectors to display and conserve his olfactory works. “Scent Squares” are devices that can be set in front of a painting or photo in order to enjoy a combined olfactory and visual experience by pressing a button on the bottom of the frame that will emit an odor as you look through it. “Scent Parabols” are designed to contain four pieces of chalk saturated with one of many special scents designed by Laudamiel. “Scent Parabols” are designed to contain four pieces of chalk saturated with one of many special scents designed by Laudamiel. The owner needs only to lift the lid of the bowl to smell the unique fragrance that has built up inside. When the odor fades, it can be replenished from a bottle of scent that comes with the work. In 2016 Laudamiel published an eloquent manifesto, Liberté, Égalité, Fragrancité, whose 50 demands range from scent education in the schools to establishing copyright protection for perfumes.[4]
3. The Korean-American artist Anicka Yi won the prestigious Hugo Boss prize in 2016, partly for her way of using of odors in her works. In order to experience her installation work Divorce, for example, visitors must stick their heads into one of two clothes dryers and inhale a pungent odor that suggests a marriage gone awry. Yi says that she uses strong smells in her works because she wants to tell gallery visitors: “Get uncomfortable, get aroused, get in your pathetic body. This isn’t an abstract painting.”[5]
4. The Columbian artist, Oswaldo Maciá has been making works combining scents and sounds for over 20 years. One of his recent pieces, called Under the Horizon, is a bathtub with a continuously running faucet whose black liquid gives off a strong smell of carrots at the same time that one hears the sound of machines stitching clothing coming from a hidden speaker. In his 2013 “Manifesto for Olfactory-acoustic Sculpture” Maciá says that all his works seek to downplay the visual by making it merely a background for a kind of sculpture that “fills space with volumes of sound and smell.”[6]
4. The Belgian, Peter De Cupere is one of the most prolific olfactory artists practicing today. He has produced work in almost every type of olfactory art, from installations like Tree Virus that we saw earlier, to scent paintings, scent sculptures, scent performances and even a scent piano called the Olfactiano. De Cupere has also been one of the most vocal advocates for olfactory art and in 2014 he issued an “Olfactory Art Manifest” that closes with this call to action:
This manifest calls all artists to enter into the smell experiment.
This manifest calls all curators, museum directors, . . . to show more olfactory art.
This manifest calls EVERYONE to smell harder![7]
Part VI. Perfume: Art or Design?
So far we have considered the wide variety of olfactory art works being made for galleries and museums and we have examined some of the issues they raise. Now, I want to look more closely at one particular issue: how should we think of commercial perfumes marketed to be worn in comparison to artists’ perfume-like works such as Clara Ursitti’s Eau Claire?
Some perfumers are convinced that perfumes should be considered works of art. For example, the current web site of the niche perfume company Venice Olfactory unabashedly calls their perfumes works of olfactory art; in fact, calls them part of the olfactory avant-garde. But there are other perfumers and art theorists who think commercial perfumes are better understood as works of Design.
A. Art Perfumes vs. Design Perfumes
I believe most commercial perfumes should be classified as Design and here are three fairly obvious reasons why.
1. First, an artist’s’perfume-like work is primarily intended to be experienced for its intrinsic olfactory interest, not used for some further experience such as being worn on the body.
2. Second, most artists’ perfume-like creations are presented in art galleries and museums, whereas most commercial perfumes are found in department stores, perfume shops or their on-line equivalents.
3. The third and most important difference between artists’ perfume-like works and design perfumes is that artists who create perfume-like works are free to choose their own themes and free to use any materials, including offensive body odors. But most perfumers who create perfumes for wear are constrained by themes chosen by a client such as a luxury fashion firm, and all perfumers are constrained by safety regulations and the need for the sensory acceptability of the materials they use. Not even a perfumer from a small niche firm is likely to design a perfume that includes the smell of vaginal odors like Ursitti’s Eau Claire.
B. Two Examples: Lets compare another artist’s perfume-like creation with a perfume created by a well-known professional perfumer.
1. In 2007, the New York artist, Lisa Kirk decided to create a perfume on the theme of revolution. She called it: Revolution Pipe Bomb. As she said in an interview, “If we can’t start a revolution at least we can create a fragrance that symbolizes rebellion.”[8] She asked some journalists and political radicals to tell her what a revolution smells like and got these replies: smoke, tear gas, burnt rubber, gasoline, and decaying flesh. Then she commissioned a professional perfumer to design a perfume simulating these odors. The resulting perfume gave off a metallic, smoky, odor, as you can see from the sample of a later version you have been given. Kirk released Revolution Pipe Bomb in a limited edition of 28, the glass vial contained in vessels shaped like pipe bombs that were made of precious metals (platinum, gold, silver) and sold by an art dealer for thousands of dollars each. An example of the vessels was also exhibited at a branch of the Museum of Modern Art in New York as part of a larger installation work.
2. Now lets compare Lisa Kirk’s process in creating and presenting dRevolution Pipe Bomb with the process the perfumer Jean Claude Ellena used in creating Un jardin en méditerranée for the luxury firm Hermès. Ellena created Un jardin en méditerranée in the same way most other design products are created—in response to what is called a “design brief.” Most design briefs for a perfume include not only the theme of the perfume, but the target audience, cost limits, and how the new scent will relate to competitor’s perfumes. In the case of Un jardin en méditerranée, the brief came from the head of Hermès’ perfume division. The brief said among other things: “Make me a perfume that smells of the scents found in [a] Tunisian garden.”[9] In addition to the theme and target audience, all perfume briefs also assume other more general constraining factors, such as attention to skin and environmental safety and sensory acceptability (which would exclude offensive odors).
Thus, Ellena, like most other professional perfumers who work for luxury brands, not only had to observe the general constraints of safety and sensory acceptability, but he was also given a theme that limited the type of scents he could use in the perfume. And, of course, Hermès also had to approve the final result.
Personally, I think Un jardin en méditerranée is a lovely and interesting scent that succeeds in suggesting a poetic experience of a Mediterranean garden. But, despite its expressive artistry, given the constraints of the design brief under which Ellena worked, Un jardin en méditerranée is more like other works of contemporary product Design than like free works of contemporary Art such as Lisa Kirk’s Revolution Pipe Bomb or Clara Ursitti’s Eau Claire.
Of course, some perfumers who work for niche perfume firms such as Frédéric Malle or Venice Olfactory are likely to have more freedom to choose their themes and materials than perfumers who work for major luxury houses like Hermès or Gucci. But if niche perfumers want to sell their perfumes to the public to be worn on the body, they are still subject to safety and sensory acceptability constraints, unlike artists who exhibit their perfumes in galleries or museums.
My preliminary conclusion is that the majority of today’s finer perfumes for wear, including many niche perfumes such as those of Frédéric Malle or Venice Olfactory, should be considered outstanding works of Design not free works of contemporary Art.
But to say that a fine perfume belongs to Design rather than to Art is hardly to demote it. The best contemporary works of Design in my view are the aesthetic and intellectual equal of the best works of contemporary Art. In fact, there are many situations where Design and Art overlap.
Part VII. When Design and Art Overlap
As we all know, many art museums exhibit outstanding works of furniture or fashion Design to be appreciated for their conceptual and formal interest, apart from their intended functions. Such was Giorgio Armani’s retrospective at the Guggenheim in 2001.
And what has been done with outstanding works of fashion could also be done with outstanding perfumes. Some of the most complex and interesting perfumes, even though their original purpose was to be worn on the body, could be put in an art museum to be contemplated solely for their formal and conceptual achievements. This has already been attempted.
In 2012 the New York Museum of Arts and Design mounted an exhibition called “The Art of Scent” in which a dozen classic commercial perfumes, such as Ernest Beaux’s Chanel No. 5 of 1921, were each spritzed from a shallow indentation in the wall and accompanied by a title, date, and the creator’s name as if they were a series of paintings.
Moreover, as we have seen, some perfume designers like Christophe Laudamiel regularly take on the role of artist, although Laudamiel usually arranges his olfactory artworks so that visitors experience them in ways similar to the way they might test a commercial perfume. For example, visitors to the exhibition “Over 21,” experienced Laudamiel’s perfume-like scents by dipping perfume blotters into the canisters that contained them.
Conversely, some artists occasionally take on the role of designer. Lisa Kirk did just that two years after she created Revolution Pipe Bomb. She commissioned a perfume that she intended to be marketed for wear that she called simply Revolution. The contents smell almost the same as the perfume in Revolution Pipe Bomb, but it comes in a generic little bottle a few centimeters high, with a simple pasted on label and currently sells over the Internet for $90. Unlike her earlier work, Revolution Pipe Bomb, which was more clearly a work of contemporary art, made to be shown in an art museum and sold to art collectors through an art dealer, the little bottle of Revolution stands ambiguously on the border between Art and Design. When you buy a bottle of Revolution from an on-line perfume site are you buying a niche perfume or a piece of contemporary olfactory art? Is Lisa Kirk letting a wider audience participate in her art project of creating “a perfume to symbolize rebellion,” or is she just selling another niche perfume, if an odd and rather unpleasant one?
When we enter these regions where contemporary art and contemporary design overlap, it is not easy to sort out the issues and certainly not easy to give a simple answer as to which category, Art or Design, is most appropriate for any particular work.
Some Concluding Thoughts
At the beginning of “Il Nome, Il Naso,” Italo Calvino writes:
« Come epigrafi in un alfabeto indecifrabile, . . . così voi resterete, profumerie, per l'uomo del futuro senza naso.”
“Like epigraphs in an indecipherable alphabet, . . . so you will be perfumeries, for the noseless man of the future.”
These words, first published in 1973, now seem unduly pessimistic, reflecting as they do the error of Darwin and Freud who saw the human sense of smell as a primitive vestige in the course of disappearing. Since the time Calvino wrote “Il Nome, Il Naso” there has not only been a sensory awakening in the sciences that has revalued the sense of smell, but there has also been a sensory awakening in contemporary art and design with respect to smell.
Over the last two decades, as we have seen, many artists and designers have begun using odors in their works in ways that can awaken us to new possibilities of the sense of smell.
In this lecture I have tried to give you an idea of the variety of these olfactory art works and some of the thought provoking issues they raise.