Art Scents - On the Aesthetics of Smell

I first incorporated scent into an artwork in 1996. I was a second-year college student making work that problematized the relationship between sensory phenomena and the language used to describe it. Two years later I used scent again, this time as a first-year grad student. I thought it was a funny way to reanimate the “dematerialization of the art object” conversation at a time when dematerialization equaled fetish object/bespoke experience subsumed by economic markets. From then on, scent was just another tool in my toolbox. It wasn’t until 2006, when as a forth-year professor I noticed there were other artists taking scent seriously. (Thanks Google!) That year I created the Institutional Wellbeing series, which introduced scent to museum audiences for the next nine years.

Since then it’s been wild watching the fields of olfactory art and scent culture develop. While there has always been quite a bit of good writing about scent culture from historical, sociological, and anthropological perspectives, there has been comparatively little writing from a critical art perspective, save for the forward thinking work of Jim Drobnick and Larry Shiner, respectively. For much of the time the olfactory artwork itself has been far ahead of critical olfactory art writing in terms of seriously addressing scent’s role in art culture, its absence in the history of Western philosophy, and its pejorative relationship to histories of anthropology and psychoanalysis.

All that has changed with the publication of Larry Shiner’s Art Scents: Exploring the Aesthetics of Smell and the Olfactory Arts (Oxford University Press). (Disclaimer: A few of my projects and writings are cited in this book.) His discussion of Kant/Hegel/Scruton is worth the price of the book alone. But there is so much more. Have a look for yourself.