Papers
Most of the conference papers listed in my CV were either turned into parts of articles or parts of books, but three papers contain considerable material that has not appeared in print and that I share here: the 2021 “Reply to Critics” of my book, Art Scents, a 2010 paper on the interrelation of craft, design and art, and a 1999 paper on folk art, outsider art, and kitsch.
2021 “Reply to Critics” (Presented at an “Author Meets Critics” session devoted to my book Art Scents: Exploring the Aesthetics of Smell and the Olfactory Arts” at the American Society for Aesthetics, November 18, 2021 in Montreal Canada.)
Reply to Critics
First, many thanks to Yuriko Saito for proposing and organizing this session.I am also deeply grateful to Cynthia Freeland, Emily Brady, and Remei Capdevila-Werning for their careful reading of my book and thoughtful commentaries. But before I address their comments, I would like to make a couple of brief remarks on some recent empirical and philosophical work on olfaction and on an additional perspective from aesthetics that has appeared since I finished the book two years ago.
The new work on olfaction is relevant to the first third of the book where I answered the claim that smell is cognitively too weak to be a basis for aesthetic judgments by citing empirical evidence from the natural and social sciences showing that on balance smell does have considerable cognitive powers. Since the time my book was published in early 2020, a brilliant survey and analysis of research on the cognitive potential of human olfaction by Anne-Sophie Barwich has appeared, called Smellosophy: What the Nose Tells the Mind. Barwich is both a historian and philosopher of science and argues that the evidence now strongly supports the view that our sense of smell has a significant cognitive component, although unlike vision, smell’s cognitive aspect has not evolved to recognize stable objects, but to evaluate qualitative differences in the environment for rapid decision making. Thus, once we understand smell’s specific purposes and its coding mechanisms in the brain, we can see that smell functions differently, but no less effectively, from vision or hearing to sustain our survival and flourishing. Barwich also shows that the variable individual effects in smell perception are identifiable and measurable, thus blunting the claim that smell perception is irredeemably subjective and idiosyncratic.
The additional new perspective from aesthetics relevant to smell dawned on me after reading the recent symposium of articles in JAAC, edited by Aron Meskin, dealing with Peter Kivy’s work. It is not that Kivy specifically addressed the issue of smell. But I realized that his proposal for an “enhanced formalism” that he developed to explicate absolute music as a “sound structure without semantic or representational content that sometimes possesses the emotions as heard qualities” could be applied to many olfactory art works, especially perfumes. Thus, one could say that some perfumes are “smell structures without semantic or representational content that sometimes possess emotions as smelled qualities.” I believe it is no accident that perfumers have often discussed their work with the help of music-related terms such as composition, accords, or harmonies. Naturally, translating Kivy’s arguments from the realm of audition to that of olfaction would require some nuanced adaptations, but I think it might be worth the trouble. Of course, many olfactory art works, including some perfumes, as Chiara Brozzo has argued, can be shown to have actual representational and expressive qualities on grounds other than formal or structural ones.
With those general considerations out of the way, let’s turn to the helpful commentaries of Cynthia Freeland, Emily Brady, and Remei Capdevila, beginning with a discussion of the art status and aesthetic appreciation of perfumes. Freeland’s case for art perfumes appeals to the rise of what is called niche perfumery, namely, perfume makers who place greater emphasis on creativity and innovation than on wearability and market share. She emphasizes that many of these of perfumes are characterized by such art-status giving characteristics as complexity, symbolic value, emotional suggestion, and, in some cases, an actual intention to be art works. But Freeland rightly places even greater stress on certain of the perfume blogs that have been in existence for over a decade now, blogs whose participants are animated by an interest in the creative qualities of niche perfumes rather than in simply finding something unusual to wear. Freeland convincingly stresses that the point of wearing an artistic perfume is less adornment in Stephen Davies sense, than to generate an “imaginative experience” that involves a kind of creative journey for the wearer. As for the on-line blogs and web sites devoted to artistic perfumes, she notes that many of the reviews written by knowledgeable critics are similar to art or music reviews insofar as they draw attention to the formal structure and expressive features of perfumes as well as commenting on their meanings and aesthetic effects. Moreover, Freeland believes that on-line exchanges already offer a kind of virtual parallel to the ancient Japanese ceremony of Kodo in which pieces of incense are passed around in a meditative and reflective atmosphere for identification.
Today, given Freeland’s arguments and examples, I am happy to concede her point that what I saw as merely the first glimmerings of a possible category of the “art perfume,” parallel to the category of the “art quilt,” has already achieved a much firmer foothold. Certainly, Freeland’s point that “art perfumes” already exist would be seconded by Saskia Wilson-Brown whose Los Angeles perfume school called Institute for Art and Olfaction makes the Golden Pear awards to the most creative niche perfumes each year. I would only add that art perfumes in the sense of creations that put aesthetic qualities ahead of wearability, come in at least three different kinds. First there are the type of niche perfumes Freeland has in mind which are aimed at discriminating perfume lovers, then there are what we could call “artist’s perfumes,” olfactory creations conceived by professional artists primarily for exhibition in galleries and museums, such as Clara Ursitti’s Self-Portraits in Scent or the works Christophe Laudamiel shows in the two art galleries that represent him, finally, there are scents intended primarily to represent or symbolize such as those created by Sissel Tolaas to stand for the smells of various cities she has been commissioned to study or Herzog and De Meuron’s “olfactory object” called “Rotterdam,” mentioned by Remei Capdevila. Of course, there can be overlap among these types, such as the works created by seven young perfumers who were invited to make experimental scents for an exhibition called “Perfumers Gone Wild” held last May at New York’s first art gallery devoted solely to olfactory art, Olfactory Art Keller, whose creator Andreas Keller is a respected philosopher. In a recent exhibition at Olfactory Art Keller, called “Ten Encounters,” for which participants were asked to create a scent representing an important historical encounter, several of those invited were niche perfumers who market their own brands.
My final thought in response to Cynthia Freeland’s critique, is to underline that when I stressed that most perfume development should be seen as part of design rather than as part of high art, I did not mean to diminish the achievements of either mainstream or niche perfumers by calling their works “design.” On the contrary, I reject the view that art possesses an inherent cultural superiority over design. Rather, since artists are free to do anything, whereas designers are normally constrained by such things as function, need, cost, safety, and environmental impact as well as by aesthetics and symbolism, Design is in my opinion just as demanding and elevated an enterprise as Art. Of course, some philosophers, like Robert Stecker, would simply collapse the most venturesome works of design into art, but I prefer a strategy of maintaining a distinction between art and design that treats design as the equal of art.
Remei Capdevila-Werning’s welcome commentary on my discussion of smell in architecture helpfully extends and enriches the argument that smell is an important and overlooked aspect of architectural design. Ever since I began writing the chapter on architecture, I have been on the lookout for architects who emphasize the other senses, so I am not only grateful to Capdevila for calling my attention to Herzog and De Meuron’s “olfactory object,” “Rotterdam,” but to an interview in which Herzog points out that the major way architects have incorporated smell into their designs is by the selection of materials, especially the use of natural materials such as stone, brick, or wood. But, given that so many contemporary buildings primarily made of steel, concrete, glass aluminum, plastics and so on, the primary concern with smell of many architects is how to remove the residual construction odors which can cause Sick Building Syndrome. Of course, occupants of such deodorized buildings can subsequently inject ambient odors through the ventilation system or can use various devices to scent particular areas or rooms.
Among the most interesting cases of the modification of an existing building by the addition or removal of smells is Marcel Proust’s olfactory treatment of his famous apartment on the Boulevard Haussmann in Paris. Here again, I am grateful to Capdevila for calling attention to Diana Fuss’s account of Proust’s olfactory arrangements. What is remarkable about Proust’s olfactory intervention is that despite his delicate olfactory observations in the novel, he banished perfumes, flowers, cooking odors and other smells from his apartment save for the odor of the fumigatory material used to treat his asthma.
Of course, smell is only one of the neglected sensory elements in contemporary architecture. Capdevila joins philosophers like Jennifer Robinson and architects like Juhani Palasmaa in arguing that the proper experience of architecture is multi-sensory. This includes sound and touch which are almost as often neglected by architecture theorists and critics as smell is. A full experience of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, for example, involves the sound and smell of rushing water as well as the contrasting feel of smooth concrete and rough native stone. Herzog and De Meuron’s buildings are also noted for the textures of their surfaces. As Herzog remarks in his 2016 interview, people often go up to a Herzog and De Meuron building to simply touch the walls.
When it comes to Emily Brady’s work in environmental aesthetics, unlike so many environmental theorists and philosophers whose writings tend to be vision-centric, her approach is resolutely multi-sensory. Consider her wonderful evocation of the experience of standing on a rocky sea-shore listening to the sound of crashing surf as we “feel the mist thrown up by the waves, the fresh smell of the sea . . . the taste of salt.” (2003, 65). Among the many pertinent observations in Brady’s comments today, I want to focus on her discussion of repellent smells in nature. I wholeheartedly agree with her methodological point that, because of their focus on beauty, neither aesthetic preservationist nor positive aesthetics theories, can do justice to the issue of negative smells. Instead, Brady encourages us to take up the perspective of an “environmental virtue aesthetics” that foregrounds such characteristics as curiosity, sensitivity, receptivity and humility. Adopting these stances would lead to a greater openness to smells of all kinds since we would recognize that they emanate from our fellow creatures and plant species many of which are crucial to environmental diversity. Brady also marshals more specific arguments on behalf of appreciating negative smells, such as Yuriko Saito’s appeal to meet nature on its own terms and Aldo Leopold’s appeal to recognize “ecological beauty.” Unfortunately, too many people, including some political leaders, are not given to complex, science-based analyses, let alone to taking up stances of receptivity and humility vis a vis nature. Here, it may be that environmental art, including works that are addressed to smell and the other bodily senses, may have a role to play in awakening greater sensitivity to the need for species diversity, including animals and plants that give off negative odors. I think of the redoubtable olfactory advocate and consultant, Sissel Tolaas, whose adopted mission is to teach people to appreciate all types of smells, and who often creates art works as part of her practice. Similar contributions have been made with respect to urban environments by the late Victoria Henshaw and by Kate McLean with their smell-walks. We need artist-activists who will become similarly celebrated for leading multi-sensory nature walks. There may also be a role here for garden designers and caretakers; we need more of our gardens to became environmental teaching arenas rather than simply places of recreation and aesthetic diversion. For me, part of the appeal of Brady’s environmental virtue ethics approach to the problem of smelly creature and plants is that it encourages us not just to passively appreciate negative odors, but to act on behalf of maintaining environmental diversity and health.
I want to close by briefly mentioning two other important recent writings that place smell squarely in the context of multisensory experience. The first half of Carolyn Korsmeyer essay “A Tour of the Senses,” which appeared in the British Journal of Aesthetics in late 2019, opens by offering a convincing justification of the cognitive scope of smell along with taste and touch, and then turns to explore the implications of the fact that most of our sensory experience is multi-modal, deftly interpreting a classic painting in terms of its imaginative arousal of the bodily senses. Her essay draws on the work of the neuroscientist, Charles Spence of Oxford, who has extensively studied cross-modal correspondences, namely, the tendency for sensations in one modality to be matched by those in another modality, such as a particular odour giving rise to an experience of an associated colour.
In fact, the other notable set of recent writings on smell that I want to mention are all by Charles Spence who has published seven extensive neuroscience research reviews in various journals over the course of 2020 and the first half of 2021: the longest of them deals with odour/colour cross-modal correspondences, another with the use of smell in architecture, a third with the use of ambient scents in art galleries and museums, a fourth explores smell and well-being in the built environment and a fifth deals with scent in the theatre, a sixth is on scent in film, and a seventh looks at the relative absence of scent in musical works. Each of these extensive essays critically summarizes major experiments, discusses general issues, suggests new directions, and includes long bibliographies.
Spence’s research reviews on smell and cross-modal correspondences, along with Anne-Sophie Barwich’s study of the cognitive implications of olfactory research, mentioned earlier, demonstrate that vetting one’s philosophical intuitions and arguments against the best current empirical evidence, as Dominique Lopes has encouraged us to do, is liable to be a highly demanding task. Those of us who take this path need all the help we can get. I feel lucky, today, to have had such careful and inspired critics as Cynthia, Remei, and Emily, each of whom has corrected, supplemented, and enlarged the evidence and arguments of my book and have opened up new avenues of thought and experience for all of us.
2010 “Between Art and Design: Rethinking the Art vs. Craft Dualism in a Digital Age”
Museum of Arts and Design, New York (formerly The American Craft Museum)
This paper outlines a way of rethinking the art vs. craft polarity by 1) rejecting dualism in favor of a three-way analysis that includes design, 2) focusing on the positive characteristics of craft rather than using it as a foil for defining art, and 3) considering how art-craft-design relations are being modified by digital techniques in both craft and design. Some of the ideas here were incorporated into the article “Blurred Boundaries”published in Philosophy Compass in 2012.
1999 “Hight, Low, Folk, Outsider, Kitsch”
American Folk Art Museum, New York
This is a rough draft of what was going to be a chapter in my book The Invention of Art, but was dropped in its current form partly because it repeats some ideas from elsewhere in the book, but primarily in order to make the book shorter (some of the ideas were reworked with reference to Nöel Carroll’s writings as part of the section on “Mass Art” in Chapter 15 of Invention). This early draft may be of interest to some researchers since it attempts to situate the concepts of popular art, folk art, outsider art, and kitch in relation to the concepts of fine art and design, although design was woefully under analyzed both in this chapter and elsewhere in the full text of The Invention of Art. If I were to take up again this attempt to characterize these art types with respect to each other as well as to art and design, I would have to make it part of the task I discuss in the next rubric of this website (PROJECTS), namely by tracing the way in which the old category of the “mechanical arts” was gradually replaced by a variety of overlapping categories such as decorative arts, applied art, crafts and design from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century.