«Amuse-bouche. The Taste of Art» is the third art experiment at Museum Tinguely in Basel, 19 February – 17 May 2020, entering the world of the human senses. Continue reading “Amuse-bouche. The Taste of Art” at Museum Tinguely
All posts by Scent Culture Institute: Smelling in Culture, Business & Society
Chanel 5 & world history
“The scent of empires: Chanel Nº 5 and Red Moscow” is the title of a new book by the noted German historian of Eastern Europe Karl Schlögel. Continue reading Chanel 5 & world history
Political protest: “Scent of Terror”
The sense of smell can be an instrument of political protest as this current example shows. An investor wants to re-use a former site of terror in Moscow for a perfume store.
Cognitive impotence
“If olfaction were his most important sense, man’s linguistic incapacity to describe olfactory sensations would turn him into a creature tied to his environment. Because they are ephemeral, olfactory sensations can never provide a persistent stimulus of thought. Thus the development of the sense of smell seems to be inversely related to the development of intelligence.” – ALAIN CORBIN
Deceptive powers
“Our eyes are not easy to fool. Smelling is another matter.”  – LEWIS THOMAS
An early fragaholic
“Sometimes at parties I slip away to the bathroom just to see what colognes they’ve got. I never look at anything else— I don’t snoop—but I’m compulsive about seeing if there’s some obscure perfume I haven’t tried yet, or a good old favorite I haven’t smelled in a long time. If I see something interesting, I can’t stop myself from pouring it on. But then for the rest of the evening, I’m paranoid that the host or hostess will get a whiff of me and notice that I smell like somebody-they-know.” – ANDY WARHOL
Warhol, A. (1975). The philosophy of Andy Warhol: from A to B and back again. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, p. 150.
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DIY Perfumer
“The only qualification I have is a school certificate I was awarded at thirteen … I am self taught and have become who I am through encounters with people and individuals and, of course, with their work. ” – JEAN-CLAUDE ELLENA
Smells inform about life and death
“Smells are not decodable. Nor can they be inventoried, for no inventory of them can have either a beginning or an end. They ‘inform’ only about the most fundamental realities, about life and death, and they are pan of no significant dichotomies except perhaps that between life beginning and life ending. There is no pathway here other than the direct one between the receiving centre and the perimeter of its range – no pathway other than the nose and the scent themselves. Somewhere between information and the direct stimulation of a brutal response, the sense of smell had its glory days when animality still predominated over ‘culture’, rationality and education – before these factors, combined with a thoroughly cleansed space, brought about the complete atrophy of smell. One can’t help feeling, though, that to carry around an atrophied organ which still claims its due must be somewhat pathogenic.” – HENRI LEFEVBRE
Evocative power
“Odors are at once evocative and suggestive, redolent with significance.” ION M. LEWIS
Attention economy
“So we thought an odor couldn’t hurt” – MARTIN KIPPENBERGER