Books

Overview

This book explores the importance for aesthetics of two sensory revolutions in recent decades, one in the sciences and humanities that has positively revalued the so-called “lower” senses including smell, the other in the arts that has led to the emergence of widespread experimentation with scents in many art media.  It brings together cutting-edge research on olfaction in the sciences and humanities with current thinking about the nature of art and aesthetics in philosophy to develop the beginnings of an olfactory aesthetics.   I have written the book in way that should be accessible not only to philosophers but also to artists, designers, art critics, and anyone interested in the arts or curious about the sense of smell. Because so many philosophers and scientists in the past, including Darwin and Freud, have viewed the sense of smell as weak and of little importance and since aesthetic theorists from Plato to Kant to Roger Scruton and others in the present have denied that scents can be the basis of art works or that the human sense of smell can generate genuine aesthetic experiences, Parts I and II of the book demonstrate the possibility and legitimacy of an olfactory aesthetics.  In making that case I not only develop philosophical arguments on behalf of the sense of smell, but also draw on evidence from biology, neuroscience and psychology, along with anthropology, linguistics and history.  This evidences is supplemented and illustrated through works of literature since poets like Baudelaire and Heaney, and novelists like Proust, Joyce and Woolf have richly shown how to articulate olfactory experiences.

            Once Parts I and II have established a baseline of up-to-date information about odor and the sense of smell and shown that smell is capable of supporting critical aesthetic reflection, Parts III and IV go on to explore a variety of olfactory arts and the aesthetic issues they raise.  The olfactory arts I investigate include not only the use of odors in works of sculpture, installation or performance art intended for galleries and museums, but also the use of odors to accompany works of theater, film and music, as well as the use of odors by designers for signature scents in stores and hotels, and even the use of odors by avant-garde chefs.  In addition, two chapters are devoted to the aesthetic and artistic status of perfume. Short interludes explore such things as the Japanese art of incense called Kodo, and the role of scent in the appreciation of gardens and the imagination of Paradise.   Among the theoretical issues addressed are those of definition, appropriateness, interpretation, ontology, and ethics.  Special attention is given to the implications of the various olfactory arts for the definition of art and aesthetics and the relationship between the concept of art and the concept of design.  A distinctive feature of the book is not only its use of literary examples throughout, but also its comparisons between Western and non-Western attitudes toward smell and the olfactory arts, especially those of India, China, Japan, and the Islamic world.

Revisionary Thoughts (May, 2021)

Writing a book that tries to present an overview of a large topic always risks leaving out many things that other writers would include and simplifying matters specialists would present more tentatively.  But in writing any book there comes a point (in this case, about seven years on) where one must stop while the subject still feels fresh and energizing and leave the many things not covered for others to address. Had I continued my research and writing longer, I would have dealt with a number of topics omitted such as the beginnings of a revival of interest in using odors and the sense of smell in medicine ( late onset anosmia seems to be a sign of oncoming Alzheimers and Parkinson’s as well as an indicator of infection with the Covid-19 virus). Another area worth exploring would be the many digital devices for producing, monitoring, or communicating odors. Finally, in the historical and cultural sections of the book, I regret not including more examples of attitudes toward smell and the practice of the olfactory arts from outside Europe and the United States. Although I do include a number of Asian and Middle Eastern examples, there are too few from African and South American sources.

Now that the book has been released (April 13, 2020), I have three specific additions/corrections to make. 1) In the short section of Chapter 10 devoted to the problems that olfactory art presents for museums and galleries, I should have mentioned the interesting essays by Jim Drobnick, Andreas Keller, and Richard J. Stevenson on the subject.  Their articles can be found in The Multisensory Museum: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Touch, Sound, Smell, Memory, and Space edited by Nina Levent and Alvaro Pascual-Leone (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014). I also omitted this important volume from the Bibliography. 2) After Art Scents appeared, I learned that Harvard University Press was publishing A. S. Barwich’s Smellosophy: What the Nose Tells the Mind in 2020. It conducts a lively and wide ranging investigation of the neuroscience concerning the cognitive powers of smell to which I could only devote two chapters. For readers interested in the science of olfaction, I heartily recommend it; she makes telling use of her background in both the history and the philosophy of science. Moreover, she actually spent three years working in Stuart Firestein’s lab and also conducted interviews with many of the major neuroscientists around the world who are working on smell. Had her book appeared a year earlier, the science parts of chapter three of Art Scents that deals with the cognitive powers of smell would have been able to make an even stronger case in favor of smell’s potential to inform critical aesthetic reflection. 3) With respect to corrections, I am embarrassed to note that although I spelled the artist Otobong Nkanga’s surname correctly the first time it appeared, I did not catch the fact that I turned it into “Nkanda” in subsequent discussions. My apologies to Otobong Nkanga, whose work, as I indicate in Chapter 10, makes brilliant use of smell to convey important ideas and perceptions. I am even more embarrassed to have overlooked the misspelling of Koo Jeong A’s first name on page 186 where it is given as “Kim.” I owe her my deepest apology.

Revisionary Thoughts & Critiques (December 2021)

In November of 2021 Art Scents was the subject of an “Author Meets Critics Session” session at the annual meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics, held in Montreal, Canada. The session, organized by Yuriko Saito of the Rhode Island School of Design, featured papers by Cynthia Freeland of the University of Houston on my discussion of claims that perfume is art, Remei Capdevila-Werning of the University of Texas-Rio Grande on my chapter on smell in architecture, and Emily Brady of Texas A&M on my discussion of smell in nature and gardens. For those interested, I have placed the full text of my “Reply to Critics” in the PAPERS section of this website; it represents my revisionary thoughts and notices of some important new works on olfaction as of the end of December 2021.

Revisionary Thoughts & Critiques (October 2022) Further reflection on the “perfume as art” issue led me to write a paper called “Art, Adornment, Abstraction, Music: Thinking Perfume” which carries forward Chiara Brozzo’s and Cynthia Freeland’s arguments that some perfumes are serious works of art.  I begin with Stephen Davies’ analysis of adornment, which shows that in some cultures, adornment and art are not viewed as mutually exclusive and then examine the arguments of Chiara Brozzo and Cynthia Freeland for the existence of art perfumes in contemporary Western cultures, finding their case convincing except for two areas that need further development: 1) the formal argument for art perfumery and 2) the distinction between art perfumes and non-art perfumes.  The remainder of the essay develops an additional formal argument for art perfumes by examining some structural parallels between perfume and music and then gives greater specificity to the concept of art perfumery by sketching a framework for sorting out the different types of perfumes.  The framework consists of a continuum stretching from what I call Artists’ Perfume-like Works through Artistic Niche Perfumes and Artistic Mainstream Perfumes to Design Perfumes.  The discussion of design perfumes brings me back around to Davies’s concept of adornment and some closing comments on the compatibility of art and adornment in the case of art perfumes. The article has been submitted for consideration by an aesthetics journal.

Using many graphic examples, this book argues that the modern concepts, practices, and institutions of “fine art” as a distinct realm standing far above the applied, decorative, craft, and design arts only became fully established in the first third of the nineteenth century. I was initially inspired to write The Invention of Art by an attempt to make Paul Oskar Kristeller’s widely anthologized essay in the history of ideas, “The Modern System of the Arts,” more accessible to students in art and arts management, who took my course on aesthetics.  Kristeller’s essay argued that the category of fine art or “Art with a capital ’A’” (consisting of a core of five or six major arts) only dates from the eighteenth century.   My argument concerns not simply the classificatory category, “fine art,” but the entire social and cultural complex of high art, thus treating the establishment of the modern idea of art as part of a larger social and cultural break. The emergence of a new cultural complex of fine arts with its ideal of the artist as the free genius of the creative imagination went hand in hand with new practices such as an end to borrowing in music composition, new institutions, such as the secular concert hall and the fine art museum, and the inculcation of new behaviors appropriate to those institutions such as silent listening and contemplative looking. I also emphasize the powerful social and economic factors shaping those changes in beliefs, practices and institutions, factors such as the emergence of a market economy and a middle class desirous of using the arts to establish their social status. Although I trace the gradual emergence of one or another anticipation of these elements of the modern complex of the fine arts, I argue that the modern social system of the arts was not fully consolidated until the 1830s, with the Romantic concept of the artist playing a crucial role.  I do not end the book there, but trace further permutations in the social system of fine art throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, suggesting that by the end of the twentieth century the category of fine art itself had become diluted to the point of incoherence. The book has been translated into Korean (2015), Spanish (2014), Italian (2010), and Turkish (2004) and I understand a Chinese version is in preparation.

A number of scholars have criticized both Kristeller’s and my version of the claim that the concept of fine art is a modern construction or invention; several argue that it is already present in Aristotle’s Poetics.  But neither Kristeller nor I deny that there are certain continuities between Greek or Roman ideas of art and those of the modern period, rather, as I have suggested in recent essays, such continuities are far less important than the deep discontinuities and it is precisely the radically altered social and economic context that makes the ancient and modern concepts of art profoundly different.

Revisionary Thoughts (May, 2021)

1.  The first change I would make would be to replace the phrase “system of art” wherever it appears by “social system of art” or “cultural system of art.”  The central point of the book is to give an account of how an older, broader social/cultural complex of arts was transformed into a new social/cultural complex with hierarchical characteristics related to race, class and gender prejudices.  Too often in the book, I use the unmodified phrase “system of art” for this social and cultural complex, thereby inviting confusion with Kristeller’s purely intellectual account in his “The Modern System of the Arts.”  The originality of my argument is its emphasis on the social, behavioral, and institutional changes that embodied the ideational changes taking place.  

2.  Another, closely related, change I would make if I were writing the book today, would be to find an alternative to my overly broad use of the term “craft,” which I anachronistically projected on the entire history of Western culture, speaking of the pre-eighteenth century social “system of art/craft” that held art and craft in unity.  Although one can identify some first steps toward the separation of art and craft in the Renaissance, the separation was not complete and universal in Europe until the early nineteenth century.  But as Glenn Adamson shows in The Invention of Craft (2012), the term “craft” only got its contemporary meanings in the late nineteenth century.  At that time “crafts” along with terms like “applied arts,” “decorative arts, “industrial arts,” “minor arts” began to be used as replacements for the now defunct “mechanical arts.”  One of my initial motives in writing The Invention of Art had been to counter the art vs. craft dichotomy that had persisted in philosophical aesthetics from Kant to Collingwood, Gadamer and many others who typically treated what they often refer to with the modifier “mere craft” as the routine carrying out of a preconceived plan.  A central argument of The Invention of Art is that prior to the long eighteenth century much of what we separate as “art” and “craft” were united over the centuries and simply called “art.”  The medieval and early modern contrast of the “liberal” and “mechanical” arts did not amount to the same thing as the modern contrast of the “fine arts” with its various “others.”  My choice of “craft” to stand for all of these “others,” was a strategic decision, but a potentially misleading one .         

3.  A third change I would make if I were writing the book today would be to more explicitly acknowledge certain continuities between the modern concept of fine art and that of the Ancient world.   A year after the Invention of Art came out, Stephen Halliwell published The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems, which traces Aristotle’s category of “mimetic arts” down through leading art theorists to the Romantics.  Halliwell convincingly argues that Aristotle’s idea of mimesis combined a “world-reflecting” (imitative) aspect with a “world-creating” (representational) aspect that even included an expressive dimension and goes on to suggest that Artistotle’s category of “imitative arts” closely resembles the modern category of the fine arts.  Yet Halliwell himself notes that the persistence of the idea of imitative arts did not “at all mean underestimating the significance of eighteenth century developments” (p. 12). Had Halliwell’s book appeared a year before mine rather than a year after, I could have comfortably integrated his argument into my discussion, while stressing that the persistence of imitative views in theoretical classifications of the arts is not inconsistent with the emergence of radically new meanings tied to new practices, behaviors, and institutions.   As I stress in my chapter on the artistic practices of Ancient Greece, the social and cultural role that theater or sculpture played in social life in Greece was very different than the role those arts play in modern life.  Thus, one can accept an aspect of intellectual continuity in the concept of art from Aristotle to the present, while at the same time recognizing that the discontinuities are even more important with respect to many regulative component concepts (work, originality), behaviors (contemplative looking), practices (art auctions), and institutions (art museums).

            4. No doubt, there are other things I would have to modify were I writing the book today since twenty years of historical scholarship have considerably altered our picture of European social and cultural history.  For example, although a secondary theme in the book was tracing the rise of the concept of the “aesthetic” and its attachment to art, I would now have to revise aspects of my treatment of it.  As Paul Guyer has pointed out in A History Modern Aesthetics, both Kristeller and I treat a certain view of aesthetic autonomy as more normative in the eighteenth century than it was.   Another important theme of my book that would have to be revisited is the account of the emergence of the modern ideal of the artist as the prophetic genius of the creative imagination.  Over the last twenty years not only have there been new studies of various aspects of the emergence of the modern ideal of the artist, but increasingly many artists and art critics have tended to treat the traditional post-Romantic ideal of “the Artist” with considerable irony.  

This book emerged from my long-standing interest in the philosophy of history and historiography. Given that my doctoral work was done in France, I took a more phenomenological than analytic approach to the philosophy of history when I began teaching in the 1960s and 1970s.  But the major influence on this book was the work of the historian and theorist, Hayden White, who stressed the rhetorical and literary aspects of historical writing.  I had been impressed by White’s discussion of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napleion and conceived the idea of doing a similar analysis of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Recollections, since Tocqueville discusses the same events as Marx (the 1848 Revolution in France), but from a Burkean type conservative perspective.   Drawing on contemporary literary theory, especially aspects of French structuralism, I examined the way Tocqueville’s descriptions and analyses of the events of 1848 as he experienced them reflected certain rhetorical tropes and employed various literary devices that shape the import of the narrative and its effect on the reader.  Each chapter of my book explores Tocqueville’s Recollections from the perspective of one or another literary phenomenon such as genre, plot form, code, voice, or discourse. Instead of reading the Recollections as a documentary “source” or as a “work” in the career of Alexis de Tocqueville, I analyze it as a “text,” asking how it is made, how its parts function within a whole, and above all, how it achieves its effects on the reader. Treating Recollections in terms of contemporary genre theory, for example, not only considers its use of the memoir conventions, but calls attention to such component sub-genres as the set portrait and the tableux. Considering the text’s narrative structure, on the other hand, illuminates the way it represents historical time in terms of a a dual level tragic-ironic plot. Perhaps most important, studying the text’s codes lays out the system of binary moral-social operators which control the text’s discourse, yet at points subvert the unity of the code itself. I then compare Tocqueville’s discursive strategies to two other works describing and analyzing the revolution of 1848: Georges Duveau’s classic twentieth century study 1848: The Making of a Revolution, and Gustave Flaubert’s representation novel Sentimental Education. Finally, I briefly discuss Tocqueville’s narrative and discursive strategies in three other works, Democracy in America, The Old Regime and the Revolution, and his fascinating story of a journey by horseback through the pristine woods of the Michigan frontier in 1830, “A Fortnight in the Wilderness."

Revisionary Thoughts (2020)

When this book was first written over 40 years ago, I thought it might contribute to the small stirring of interest in the literary aspects of historiography at the time and even show the fruitfulness of such an approach for understanding the history of ideas.  But, like any book that tries to bring two disciplinary areas into deeper contact, both those areas (history and literary analysis) have changed a good deal since then.  Certainly, if I were writing it today, I would use more recent discussions in the theory of narrative to analyze Tocqueville’s text.  But, had I energy enough and time, I would make the book about literary form and history in all of Tocqueville’s works, giving equal time to Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the Revolution which only got a few pages each in one chapter of The Secret Mirror.  Nevertheless, as I look at The Secret Mirror again, I think its central point, namely, that a literary/rhetorical analysis can give us important insights into certain tics and constraints in Tocqueville’s thinking and writing holds up pretty well.

My first book was a greatly expanded version of my 1961 doctoral dissertation for the Université de Strasbourg in France.  Gogarten was a prominent German Protestant theologian who was convinced that the authentic Christian message is compatible with the secularization of culture wrought by modern science and philosophy.  In his earlier work Gogarten was strongly influenced in developing a historical view of transcendence by the work of the social historian Ernst Troeltsch, and Gogarten’s mature work was equally shaped by the existential perspective on human nature developed by Kierkegaard and echoed in Heidegger’s Being and Time.  Gogarten was a major supporter of Rudolf Bultmann’s demythologizing interpretation of the New Testament, which translated the Christian message in terms of an existential anthropology. The main chapters of my book survey Gogarten’s major theological works.

Revisionary Thoughts (2020)

Given that I left theology long ago, it makes no sense to ask how would I write the theological parts of this book differently today.  Yet, if the theological parts no longer interest me (and may be irrelevant to protestant theologies of today), the historical appendix to the book, “Between the Times,” that includes an examination of Gogarten’s thinking and behavior during the Nazi period may be of interest to historians.  Like many other politically conservative German intellectuals, Gogarten struggled to find the right way to confront National Socialism when it first gained power in 1933. Although he unequivocally rejected the notoriously collaborationist “Deutschen Christen,” he also resisted turning against the idea of any dialogue with secular thought, a position exemplified by the Swiss theologian Karl Barth.  His public criticism of Barth on this score led many to regard Gogarten as complicit with the Nazi regime. In the “Between the Times,” I explore not only Gogarten’s early thought, but try to set his ethical and political writings, such as Politische Ethik, in the context of German political thought of the time, especially the conservative stream that the historian, Fritz Stern, has called “political romanticism.”