That is, borrowing ill-fitting terminology from art history can make it seem as though the world of perfume is too insecure to develop terms and contexts of its own. Almost any work of art, in any medium (even scent) can be made to fit almost any of art history’s period categories, if you shoehorn hard enough – but the question remains, does the shoe fit? Or actually, there’s a much more pressing (and, I’m afraid, crueler) question and issue involved: That the very categories you want to “borrow” from art history no longer have much currency among art historians.
— Blake Gopnik, responding to Chandler Burr. They're discussing the exhibit The Art of Scent 1889-2012, which has just closed, and more particularly, Burr's classifications, which borrowed from the terminology of art movements and periods.*
To follow the conversation from the beginning, see here and here.
* The scents for the exhibit were: Guerlain Jicky (Romanticism); Chanel No. 5 (Modernism); Givenchy L’Interdit (Abstract Expressionism); Clinique Aromatics Elixir (Early American School); Drakkar Noir (Industrialism); Thierry Mugler Angel (Surrealism); Issey Miyake L’Eau d’Issey (Minimalism); Estée Lauder Pleasures (Photo Realism); Dolce & Gabbana Light Blue (Kinetic Sculpture); Prada Amber (Neo-Romanticism); Hermès Osmanthe Yunnan (Luminism); and Maison Martin Margiela Untitled (Post-Brutalism).
I agree, insofar as I have no idea what the categories he refers to are and therefore disagree that they should be there. Staring at the list you graciously posted, I feel like I’m reading some sort of elitist jargon. Should I not be able to squeeze the most meaning from an exhibit without having a degree in art history? It seems not.
Maybe that’s why I was heartened when Gopnik
My phone hates me. I was going to mull on this for an hour. 😛
I will say now, though, that I find it strange that the fragrance for “Kinetic Sculpture” is a scent that smells virtually the same 5 hours in as 5 minutes in.
Jessica made this same point in her review of the exhibit — “I don’t believe that we can necessarily draw direct analogies between art forms, even within the same decade. Various mediums of art and design don’t march in lockstep. I could write a few hundred words more on the inaccuracies of describing L’Interdit as a work of Abstract Expressionism, or on the anachronistic use of the term Luminism (with a capital “L”) to describe Osmanthe Yunnan. Why visual art, anyway? If we must have this kind of comparison, why not architecture, dance, literature? And doesn’t fragrance have its own schools, its own traditions, waiting to be named?”
I agree, and with your response to BChant. Correct me if I’m wrong but Luca Turin did everything but capitalize “big bad florals of the 80’s” in The Perfume Guide. In fact, one could arrange his reviews by release date and publish it as a textbook, if reformulation wasn’t such a problem.
I think it would have been more straightforward to leave simply the year next to the scent urinals and in the press kits. It seems to have damaged the credibility of the exhibit, and by extension the art of perfume. No one takes you seriously if you wear a suit that doesn’t fit.
Thanks, R. 😉
Applying periods to perfume is a stretch, but what else can we do? Perfume discussion is so new, there is a narrow vocabulary and most of that is technical.
Well, he could have come up w/ a useful set of “periods and movements” in perfumery and named them, right? I don’t see why that would require any sort of technical vocabulary.
Well, I agree with Gopnik this time! What a turnabout from the Daily Beast review! All of sudden scent is worthy to discuss as art (or at least high-status design) and indeed has more room for creating new terms of critical reference in than longer-standing arts. Gopnik sounds like a perfumista now 😉 All credits to Mr. Burr — many of us may not agree with the stucture of the exhibit, but it sounds like he is in some ways changing hearts and minds. I think he should be quite satisfied that he has engaged people, whether they agree with the validity of the historical categorizations or not.
His tone here is less dismissive, but not sure it’s a true about-face (and really mean “not sure” — I refuse to go read both articles closely to see if he specifically recants anything he said originally).
Ha! Completely understand the desire to ignore all the theory on this sort of topic. It was just the end of Gopnik’s last message that seemed different to me:
“As you know, and as I’ve written, I think there’s as much to say and think and feel about scent as about any of the longer-established disciplines such as painting or sculpture or “classical” music. In fact, so little work has been done on scent that there’s more room to move in the field, and more paths to strike out on. I categorically reject any sense that olfactory art is “lower”, in any way, or less worthy of the most serious discourse, than older art forms.”
Tone or no, that reads pretty different from the Daily Beast review, which implied all perfume just smelled like perfume, and there was less content in it than in what we traditionally call art.
Maybe just using the term olfactory art is a capitulation.
I really a) don’t think perfume is an art and b) don’t much care anyway. So I will continue to stay out of it 🙂
Art terminology be appropriately used or not, but goodness what a self-satisfied smirk is there in his delivery, makes me long for a dry academic analysis articles of 30 years ago.
But what about the fact that perfume has notes, tones, harmony, accords (chords), movements, and composition? Susan Irvine’s book on perfume states that “it was nineteenth century perfumer Piesse who first described perfume in terms of music”. I long for this discipline to develop its own terminology without having to borrow from others.