![]() on the lost olfactory arts and built a career around reconstructing “the disappeared smells of the past as to recreate a more complete ‘view’ of the history of art.” Meanwhile, those of us outside the art world seem to respond to scent-as-art with continuous surprise, discovering and rediscovering the form in awareness cycles prone to suffusion and dissipation. Verbeek’s response was to immerse herself in the other: she dedicated her MA thesis to the role of smell in contemporary art, started organizing olfactory exhibitions, wrote her Ph.D. It’s a common quandary because we exist in a cultural landscape more attuned to sight and sound than smell. ‘Something as invisible and ephemeral as scent can be art?! How am I supposed to deal with this as a visually oriented art historian?’” “My irritation immediately turned into fascination. “It was ‘ We fishing the time‘ by Ernesto Neto, an installation with lycra bags filled with cloves, kurkuma and pepper,” she recalls. She was annoyed at first, assuming she was smelling the lingering scent of a curator dinner, but hundreds of meters ahead, she saw the unexpected source of the odor: a work of art. While visiting the Venice Biennale in 2001, she encountered a strong, spicy scent in the main exhibition area. ![]() Why then, when we experience scent so powerfully, do we encounter olfactory art relatively rarely? So rarely, in fact, that we don’t necessarily know when we’re experiencing it, as Caro Verbeek, an art historian and researcher of olfactory heritage at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, discovered as a student. Our supposedly humble noses can detect nearly one trillion different scents, and the olfactory bulb-the scent center of the brain-is directly connected to the amygdala, the seat of all emotion. The myth of poor human olfactory perception is just that. “With scent, there’s nothing to look at, nothing to touch, nothing to see-there’s nothing that fits it into the classical understanding of what art is,” says Brosius, whose work revolves around creating scents designed to evoke memory, emotion or states of being.Īnd yet human beings, with their thousands of scent receptors, are literally wired to perceive and respond to odor.
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