Friday, April 27, 2012

The Question of the Osmothèque



Human beings have been perfuming themselves in one way or another for thousands of years. Yet still today, in the twenty-first century, perfumery has not been widely accepted by most people as a fine art. The best explanation for this neglect and the exclusion of perfumery from the history of the fine arts more generally is undoubtedly the sheer ephemerality of perfume.

Here today; gone tomorrow is a slogan which applies nowhere better than in the case of perfume. Even the names of what were said once to be classic perfumes are applied today to entirely new perfumes as a marketing strategy, thus effectively undermining the very possibility of perfumery's subsumption under the more general heading of the exalted and immortal beaux arts.

In the Big Black Bechstein in the Middle of the Room, I attempted (with limited success) to suggest that perfume is closer to music than it is to the other arts, in that it is intrinsically nonrepresentational in nature. I also find, although I have yet to develop this idea in writing, that perfume and music are similar to one another in terms of our experience of them, as each flows to us in an undulating stream of consciousness.


Just as it is impossible to attend equally to each and every note of a complex piece of music such as a fugue or symphony, it is impossible to attend equally to each and every note of a complex perfume as it unfurls throughout the course of its development. What we catch are snatches of the works, which is one of the reasons why they are so rich and can be experienced over and over again without ever risking boredom.

Setting to one side ontological issues and the psychology of music and perfume perception, and looking at the objects of perception instead, it becomes clear that there is a fundamental difference between the two cases. Nothing that any human being does today will ever change the basic fact that J.S. Bach's Goldberg Variations are a masterpiece. Pianists may interpret the work in various ways, and we may or may not like those interpretations (I myself never liked Glenn Gould's grunts, may he rest in peace), but the work remains the same. In perfume, in contrast, the works said to be or to have been great eventually evaporate—quite literally—from the face of the earth.


Small wonder, then, that perfumers, along with their art, have not only been relegated to the margins of history, but their names have been inscribed in invisible ink. People have been perfuming themselves for thousands of years, but how many perfumers' names from more than a century ago does anyone know? We know that the old houses are old. Creed was established in 1760, Guerlain in 1828, and quite a cluster of names appeared on the scene in the early twentieth century: Chanel, Coty, Houbigant, et al. Lately the number of houses and perfumes has been increasing at a dizzying rate, chronicled admirably by Michael Edwards in his compendium Fragrances of the World (2012). But will any of these houses or perfumes be able to carve a permanent notch onto the tablet of human history?

Certainly in the small circles in which perfumers and perfumistas travel, much attention is paid to the originality and creativity of splendid perfumes, with credit given where credit is due to the otherwise unsung heroes of this art. Perfumers' names are explicitly associated with the perfumes of their creation by those “in the know,” but in the larger reality of which perfume collection (and obsession) represents only a minuscule subculture, for the vast majority of the consumers of perfumes, the name of the creator is completely unknown. They buy a bottle of perfume, which comes in a box, and generally speaking (with rare exceptions such as the house of Frédéric Malle) nowhere on either the bottle or the box is the perfumer's name anywhere to be found. This is the first clue that perfumery is more of a business than it is an art.

Houses, not perfumers, are credited when a consumer appreciates their wares. Thus Chanel is well-known even by the unwashed masses as a great creator of perfumes in part because they have produced the likes of Coco, Allure, Coco Mademoiselle, and above all Chanel no 5, but mostly because these have been made into household names by ubiquitous, relentless, mass cultural marketing campaigns.

How many people actually know that these perfumes were the works of  Jacques Polge and Ernest Beaux? I would surmise very few, even among self-styled perfumistas who regard themselves as more sophisticated than the average consumer. The truth is that there is no need to know the names of perfumers, and people concern themselves primarily with information relevant to their lives. If someone already knows that Chanel no 5 is and always will be her signature scent, then she may have neither the need nor the desire to find out who the perfumer responsible for its existence is. The question may never even arise in her mind. Her quest is over. She needs to know nothing more about her favorite perfume than where it can be found and purchased. She may even believe (erroneously) that the perfume was composed by Gabriel Chanel herself, just as many people appear to credit designers such as Marc Jacobs and Thierry Mugler with the perfumes bearing their name on the label.

Others, who have more of an eclectic approach to perfuming themselves may well wish to find out who created one of their favorite perfumes in order to be able to seek out others by the same nose. After a while, however, it may become clear that knowing the name will not necessarily be much help in finding other equally beloved perfumes, because every single creation of every single perfumer is unique and manifests a variety of influences beyond the sheer identity of the perfumer, including his or her budget on a particular project, the specifications of the client company, etc. Consider some of the more and less famous works by Maurice Roucel.



Every perfumer well known among the members of fragrance communities has produced one or more duds. Of course, the precise identity of the “duds” varies from person to person, depending above all on their tastes...

Is Amarige abhorrent? Or is it a masterpiece? While perfumistas may have strong opinions about their likes and dislikes, there does not seem to be any real consensus about which of the perfumes of Dominique Ropion are the masterpieces and which are the duds. It's fascinating actually, that so many people can agree that Dominique Ropion is a great perfumer, while vehemently disagreeing over the specific perfumes which validate that claim.

But, again, ask most any person you encounter on the street whether they know who Dominique Ropion is, and you will find that they do not. Some may confuse him with a vague media-generated image of Dominique de Villepin around the time when U.S. congressmen were pouring French wine down the gutters of Washington D.C. and eating “freedom fries”. In all likelihood, most people will frankly confess that they do not know who Dominique Ropion is and have never to their recollection even heard the name.






Unsung Heroes: Film Directors and Perfumers




In some ways, the situation of the perfumer is not unlike that of the film director, who often gets little if any credit for the product of his labor. Instead, most moviegoers attribute the greatness of a film to its stars, though in reality they have little to do with the nature of the artwork, serving only to interpret the lines written by the screenwriter and placed into a visual context by the director. There are of course sophisticated film lovers who are very familiar with the oeuvres of many different directors, but when ordinary people go to the cinema, they are not drawn by the director's name but by the movie stars.


Every rule has its exceptions, and I'd surmise that many of the people who go to see or rent a film by Martin Scorsese or Woody Allen or Stanley Kubrick (may he rest in peace) are doing so for the director, not for whoever the stars of a particular film by any of these iconic directors might be.



The ultimate exception to the rule may be Alfred Hitchcock, whose name became a household word through the massive exposure to him afforded to ordinary people through his many years on television as the host of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. In any case, the proportion of savvy movie viewers is likely to be as small as the proportion of savvy perfume users, it seems to me.




Perfumers are in some ways much worse off than film makers, however, because they lose all control over what is done with the perfumes of their creation once they become the property of a house. Reformulation is nothing if not the perversion by someone else of an artist's creation. The reasons for undertaking reformulation appear to be primarily economic, but there may be other considerations as well, including the desire on the part of a house's management team to leave their mark on or shape the quality of their offerings. I touched upon some of these topics in my earlier Reflections on Reformulation, but my point here is that the same thing does not generally speaking happen to the work of film directors.




A film is a film, and it stays that film for all time. Some people have protested the colorization of classic black and white films as a perversion of the original work, and reformulation may seem to be the same sort of thing. One significant difference is that the original black and white film upon which a recolorized version is based continues to exist and is not itself destroyed by the production of another version of the film. Not so in the case of perfume, where reformulations typically supplant the original perfume, usurping its name.


Consider Bernard Chant's Cabochard. A perfume bearing this name, still produced by Parfums Grès (pictured at right), has undergone significant change as a result of reformulation. It is said that Bernard Chant is a great perfumer. It is also said that he created Cabochard. But the vast majority of people who are familiar with this perfume today have only smelled the reformulation. And my hunch is that most of the people who refer to “the great Bernard Chant” have not smelled very many of his original perfumes. We accept on hearsay that he was great because he created perfumes which are said to have been great, though some of them are no longer produced while others have been drastically reformulated.

What is also interesting, however, in contrast to the case of film, is that, in the case of perfume, it is generally accepted as perfectly permissible to do the artistic equivalent of mangling a film and destroying the original. True, people may and do lament the reformulation of their formerly beloved perfume, but they do not, it seems, generally conceive of the injury as one committed against the perfumer but rather against the consumer. It would not be possible, I think, for a perfumer to initiate a successful civil lawsuit against a house for ruining his creation because the property in question belongs to the house.

This is a second clue that perfume is not regarded as a bona fide art in modern culture more generally, no matter how we perfumistas may wish to view things. The only perfumers who retain complete creative control over their works are those who also run their own houses. Perfumers such as Andy Tauer of Tauer Perfumes, for example, are at once the nose and the chair of their own company, and this ensures complete unanimity when it comes time to make tough decisions about discontinuations or reformulations.

I imagine that Andy Tauer, the artist, never proposes to himself, as CEO, to reformulate one of his own perfumes. His wearing of both of these hats simultaneously ensures that his works will not be degraded or destroyed through reformulation. He may of course for a variety of reasons decide to discontinue a perfume or, what is almost the same, to produce limited edition perfumes which literally cannot be reproduced beyond the original batch.

With mass market and designer perfumes, it seems that even sophisticated perfumistas are initially drawn to perfumes by the house label, and then only later do they learn who the creator of the perfume was. This may be in part simply because perfumers often work for many different houses, and there is no simple or obvious way to track the career trajectory of a given perfumer. He may work for L'Artisan Parfumeur and Van Cleef & Arpels, and found The Different Company before taking up permanent residence chez Hermès.

In fact, that appears to be precisely what Jean-Claude Ellena did—among many other things. Most everyone now knowledgeable about perfume is aware that nearly everything coming out of Hermès is the work of Ellena, just as everything coming out of Caron these days is the work of Richard Fraysse, and Thierry Wasser is the house perfumer for Guerlain. But in view of the vague and sketchy history of perfume up to now, all of this really adds up to the proverbial fifteen minutes of fame, in the grand scheme of things, again, given the ephemeral nature of perfume.



Can the Osmothèque Legitimate Perfumery as an Art?



As some consumers have become more sophisticated about perfume, thanks in large part to online fragrance community websites such as Parfumo.net and Fragrantica.com, they seem to have contributed to the general feeling among practitioners in the industry that perfume deserves to be recognized as le huitième art. Enter L'Osmothèque, inaugurated in 1990 and currently directed by Patricia Nicolai of Parfums de Nicolai. According to the Osmothèque website:


Premier conservatoire de parfums de l'histoire, elle préserve ces créations si vulnérables et si précieuses de l’usure du temps, de la perte et de l’oubli. Collection vivante de parfums existants ou disparus, elle protège le patrimoine mondial de la parfumerie. 

[The first conservatory of perfume in history, the Osmothèque preserves these precious and vulnerable creations from the ravages of time, from loss, and from oblivion. A living collection of perfumes, both currently available and discontinued, the Osmothèque protects the heritage of perfumery.]


It may seem that it is straightforward to assimilate L'Osmothèque with one of the great visual arts museums, but my distinct impression is that it lies much closer to a Museum of Oenology, of which there are a surprising number in existence. Why is perfume closer to wine than to the visual arts? Because both are consumable and therefore exhaustible. It is possible to empty the last bottle drawn from the last vat of a discontinued perfume after which it is essentially extinct. The reason why vintage wines command such high prices and give rise to the likes of Rudy Kurniawan is because they, too, are exhaustible.

The Osmothèque Vault
The minds behind the Osmothèque appear keen to capture for posterity the great perfumes of the past, but it is unclear whether this can or even should be done. For one thing, unlike visual arts museums, the  direct experience of the perfumes preserved at the Osmothèque is not going to be possible for the general public. Yes, select invitees may be permitted to take a sniff here and there, but the whole reason why the perfumes are kept under argon gas is because they are subject to decomposition and evaporation. If L'Osmothèque began opening up its storage containers of famous perfumes from times past to the general public, they would not last long.

In fact, even if the vessels are carefully guarded and stored, it is inevitable that one day in the future their contents will be exhausted. This implies that, in the future, all talk of such extinct perfumes will be mere hearsay. At some point, every person on the planet who ever smelled the original perfume will actually be dead, and those who continue to talk about it will simply be parroting what others have told them. Indeed, this is the case for the early perfumes listed at the Osmothèque, which are intelligent, educated reconstructions by modern perfumers of works of the distant past. What are these reconstructions based upon? The written words of others.

This is, then, one of the dangers of a book written by people with very strong but idiosyncratic opinions who claim to be offering up a guide, as opposed to a sort of autobiographical chronicle of their own peculiar tastes. Call a book “The A-Z Guide,” and lots of ignorant and gullible people will parrot whatever it says, even with no knowledge of the objects to which the words refer. This is one of the many reasons why I believe that the caustic tone of so much of The Holey [sic] Book (see A Found Review) can only have a negative effect on the world of perfumery as a whole.

Perfume users looking for "expert guidance" may follow the lead of the Royal [ties] Coup[le] and slam perfumes which they've never even experienced and dismiss without so much as a sniff many works which in fact merit our consideration, as of course the perfumers who created them believed that they did. Ignorant readers may operate under the reasonable assumption, given the title of the book, that the authors are actually experts about something beyond their own personal tastes and beliefs.

One problem I see with the Osmothèque is that it promotes this same notion, that self-proclaimed aesthetic experts really are experts, when in fact perfume perception is highly subjective (Everything you've heard and read about perfume is true!), which implies that such "perfume pundits" are really just people with particular likes and dislikes. It's one thing to be an expert about the science of olfaction and quite another to be an “aesthetic expert” about perfume—whatever that is supposed to mean. Even worse, the whole concept of institutional preservation of select perfumes holds the potential for corporate cooption.

I recall reading an announcement by Chandler Burr of his new position as curator of the Department of Olfactory Art at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City. One of the first things he mentioned was that funding was being provided by Estée Lauder, a company which obviously has a lot at stake financially in the identification of some of its and its subsidiaries' perfumes as genuine masterpieces.

Now, the arts have always had their patrons, of course. But the difference in this case as, say, from that of the visual and literary arts, which receive a great deal of public funding, is that in order for legislators to fund such an undertaking, they would need first to believe that perfumery is an art. It's a chicken-egg problem or, if you like, a catch-22. Because perfumery is not generally regarded as an art by average people (as opposed to perfumers and perfumistas), it cannot receive the sort of public funding enjoyed by the established arts. This leaves primarily corporations to foot the bill, but they obviously have a very self-interested reason in seeing to it that the products of their making receive stamps of approval from "the experts".

On the very face of it, there would seem to be the potential for deep conflict of interest in this structure, with a perfumer as the curator and the institution being funded, I presume, by some of the houses. It seems to me rather like the situation with a Museum of Oenology underwritten by Robert Mondavi or some other winemaking giant. These apparently truth-seeking institutions may start to seem more like just another promotional tool rather than an apparatus for celebrating the great perfumes of the past. Perfumery as it has developed in human societies, and in the form to which we are granted access, is a business. There may be artists working behind the scenes, but the real power at the houses lies elsewhere.

In the end, rather than attempting to turn perfume into something which it is not and could never be, perhaps we should instead celebrate this art form's essential ephemerality. Just as the value of travel inheres primarily in the experience, and not in the souvenirs and snapshots or videos which one may gather along the way, perhaps we should focus more upon the precious beauty of the fleeting moments of pleasure which perfume can bring to us, and worry less about how to bottle that experience for all time.


17 comments:

  1. Of course, it may be art ... in eye of the beholder, yada yada. But the medium is so incredibly unstable AND the medium does not have physical that can be captured.

    The medium itself is unstable. Light, air, temperature & time that change the art. There are many types of art that die or are fleeting ... a flower arrangement, an ice sculpture, a dance performance. But for the most part, these can be captured, at least in some way, with a picture, a drawing, or a recording.

    Fragrance excludes us because it can't be captured in that same way. Well ... I take that back a bit, because I think the replications of great classic fragrances is part of an effort to try to capture its essence ... but it will never be like the original.

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    1. Hello, aweseomeness!

      I suppose that it is possible that DARPA is currently developing the means to capture and transmit scent electronically--provided that it has military applications. Who knows what the future will bring?

      Another possibility is that if gas chromatographic methods were refined to the point of being able to generate a molecule-by-molecule breakdown of a sample, then it would be possible to build (re-create) the same perfume even after its extinction.

      For now, however, we're in the odd position of having the same companies who reformulate former masterpieces in the position of being able to write the history of perfumery!

      Which Miss Dior will be represented at the Osmothèque a century from now?

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    2. Hi, well constructed argument. I agree, and totally subscribe to the last paragraph: Mag ich zum Augenblicke sagen: Verweile doch, du bist so schön. Given that arguments such as "Is architecture art?" or "Is psychoanalysis a science?" fill libraries, I always have to laugh when I come across the perfume/fashion is art dogma. I call it a dogma because there's really no discussion about the term art as such going on in the background. Some people think that they know when perfume is art because they are in the know. The argument is as simple as that. Way to arbitrary and authoritarian to me. Besides I'm not really into the esoteric type of knowledge. What I find interesting is the question: Why do some people feel the need to call it art? What inside them urges them to see it as such? Why is it so bad that perfume is not art? Sometimes I get the feeling it's all about surplus value. And I'd argue that this is the point when one falls easily prey to marketing. (I also find this surplus value creation process going on in perfume reviews. It's not enough to say: I sprayed it on, I perceived ......... No people create myths around it. They tell stories etc. I don't mind the mythmaking. But when I take into consideration how little we know for sure about perfume houses, I get the impression that what we really do is: This house (symbol) stands for this and that. Do you speak brand-language? Are you fluent in it? Did you learn the lesson that marketing taught you?)
      I also find that there's a de-humanizing aspect to the perfume is art dogma. If perfume were art then the wearer would be a piece of art. I see something similar going on in the fashion world. Women starving themselves just to wear a dress. It's all upside down. It's the commodity (the dress in my example) that should serve the customer. But to the contrary, it's the other way round. I (the customer) serve the commodity to the point of denying my body. The designers must feel extremely flattered. There is nothing that the fashion piece of art is not willing to do to themselves (or others. As in the case of those two sisters from Latin America who died of starvation literally on the runway in front of the audience. That is the moment when I think that I'm living in a Pasolini movie.)
      Recently I have been to a concept store of a designer in my hometown. I had to bite my cheeks not to start laughing out loud. Of course I was friendly and polite, but I'm also vivacious. Later that day I wrote to my sister: Life is serious, art is more serious, but nothing is as serious as a downtown concept store that sells pret a porter.
      Looking forward to reading your next argument,
      Girasole.

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  2. Guten Morgen, Girasole, und Vielen Dank!

    What a rich comment you have left, filled with fruitful avenues for philosophical reflection! Only last night I was drafting my next post, "Cabotine and I were never meant to be," in which I make a passing allusion to something like your critique of fashion-supermodel culture. I'll probably post that tomorrow, but here I'd like to pursue some of your other fascinating points.

    Why, indeed, have perfumistas become obsessed with exalting perfumery as an art? I posted a link to the above text in one of my facebook perfume groups, along with the question: “Can Perfume Be Legitimated as an Art?” and it elicited an immediate, exclamatory response from one of the members to the effect that perfumery is obviously an art. I do not believe that the person even followed the link to read the post, because he was so convinced of the answer to the question! I even detected what I believe to have been a tinge of anger that anyone should dare pose such a question! (-;

    On its face, however, there really is a serious question here. Let's take what I regard as a completely analogous case: haute cuisine. Are people going to the mat to preserve the brilliance of a single meal in the infinity of time as a work of art? No. People recognize that meals are essentially ephemeral. Although in current culture there is a sort of fascination with the production of good food, with entire television channels (“The Food Network”!) dedicated to entertaining people with “Iron Chefs” said to be culinary artists, at the same time, somewhat less exalted figures are teaching ordinary people how to prepare excellent food at home. People seem okay with the idea that the preparation of good food is a skill or a craft.

    At its best, haute cuisine does seem truly artful, but it is intrinsically ephemeral. To appreciate the artwork is to destroy it. End of story. There is no way, even in principle, to capture the splendid beauty of an excellent meal. If you produce a plastic facsimile of a brilliant meal, it is not the meal, it is not even a fake of the meal. It is just a plastic facsimile of what might have been a brilliant meal.

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    1. Just because some creations are ephemeral doesn't mean they cannot be art. Merce Cunningham understood that all dance is ultimately ephemeral. Does that mean that dance is not art?

      I could write:

      At its best, dance does seem truly artful, but it is intrinsically ephemeral. To appreciate the artwork is to destroy it. End of story. There is no way, even in principle, to capture the splendid beauty of a dance. If you produce a film of a brilliant dance, it is not the dance, it is not even a fake of the dance. It is just a plastic facsimile of what might have been a brilliant dance.

      And why is this? Anyone who has seen live performances as well as video of dances, cannot be but struck by how film fails to capture the energy, physicality and magic of the live performance. There is also labanotation with its own tremendous limitations for "preserving" what is essentially an ephemeral art (equivalent to the recipe for a dish or the formula for a perfume). And finally there are the individual variations that creep in as a particular choreography gets handed down along generations.

      Food can be a craft (or better yet an applied art or commercial art) -- it can also be a fine art.

      Perfume can be a craft (or better yet an applied art or commercial art) -- it can also be an art.

      What perfume shares with food and dance is that a particular experience of it gets consumed by the audience. In this sense all three take place in a four dimensional universe with time being the additional dimension.

      What perfume shares with food and dance is that it is more than just the smelling of the scent, or the eating of the food, and the watching of the dance, but that one gets transported to a different place, that there is something magical that occurs to the person experiencing the thing. And isn't that what art truly is?

      Also I had a friend once say that you have to have a certain amount of bad art in order to have any good art. And we can debate the meaning of "bad" versus "good" but if you think in broad terms, what it means is that there has to be a lot of human activity of varying levels of skill and talent, out of which can come the less frequent or more rare instances of brilliance.
      -NS

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    2. Dear NS,

      Welcome to the salon de parfum, and thank you so much for this thoughtful and thought-provoking reply.

      I am very glad that you brought up the counterexample of dancing. I did not mean to suggest that perfume is excluded from the realm of art solely because of its ephemerality, but you are certainly right that that is precisely how my reply reads.

      In fact, I do not deny that perfumery can be, in principle, an art. Art knows no bounds. Anything can be art. What I deny is that most of perfumery is art. In reality, most perfumers are designers, "noses for hire," who create scents for other people and companies. They are not expressing their own values so much as producing something which conforms to the dictates and desires of others. In this way, they are closer to the people who write ad copy for companies than they are to literary writers.

      Now, the fact that a given person can, say, support himself by writing ad copy does not mean that he is incapable of writing literature. Whether or not a perfumer who is creating a fragrance is an artist will similarly depend upon why and how s/he is producing something new. Ad copy is new, but that does not make it literature. Similarly, a perfume composed to satisfy a brief drawn up by a client seems to me obviously to be a work of design.

      The major disagreement arises, in debating whether perfumery is art or design, because those who exalt perfumery as an art wish to regard the object in its own right, without attention to its context or the intentions of its creators and the conditions under which it was produced. Yes, some perfumes are beautiful, but that does not suffice to make them works of art. Those who insist that perfumery is design are focusing on the context and the process. But you are absolutely right: the ephemerality is not really the issue at all. I very much appreciate your having pointed out the problem with my above characterization.

      I do believe that the context and the process are key, which is why global pronouncements that “All perfumery is art" and “No perfumery is art” both seem false to me. The way that perfumery has developed in the context of capitalism has made it the case that many professional perfumers work as designers, not as artists. I think that Daniela Andrier understands and captured the crucial distinction very well in a recent New York Times article on the “Art of Scent” exhibit. She said:

      “I do think it takes a creative soul to make fragrances, but I don’t think it makes us artists.”

      Here is the link:

      http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/16/arts/design/the-art-of-scent-at-the-museum-of-arts-and-design.html?pagewanted=all

      ,,,

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    3. reply to NS, part 2:

      Just as I do not believe that engineers are somehow lesser beings for directing their energies to the production of things with pre-delineated functions, I do not believe that perfumers who work as “noses for hire” are somehow less honorable for producing fragrances for other people and companies.

      Your comparison to dance is very fruitful, and probably even better than the best case I've come up with so far, that of music. Dance is even more ephemeral than music, as you rightly observe, because, like theater, it cannot really be captured (recorded, as can music) except as it is experienced. One big distinction between dance and theater, on the one hand, and perfume, on the other, is that perfume, as we encounter it, is essentially commodified.

      This raises the question whether the masses really are right in their selection of perfumes, say, Estée Lauder Pleasures and Dolce & Gabbana Light Blue as masterpieces. Since when did works in any realm become “masterworks” or “art” by winning popularity contests? No one would say that the bestselling pop songs are the acme of musical art, so why should that be true in the case of perfume? Well, that's a separate topic, which I should probably think about some more and then maybe open up a new discussion...

      Thank you very much for stopping by and pointing out the weaknesses in my views! I hope to read more comments from you here again soon!

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    4. Reply to your Reply Part 1
      In no specific order:

      You refer to necessity for survival:
      I don’t think necessity disqualifies a certain human endeavor from being art. Look at clothing --we need clothing to survive does that mean that there can be no such thing as the textile arts? Ikkat, batik, brocade...

      And similarly with food. Not that every meal is a piece of art, but a seven course meal with wine pairings, where each dish and beverage are a symphony of flavors, textures, shapes and colors served in a setting of carefully staged lighting, setting, and props, is most definitely art. Lord knows one doesn’t need to eat such an elaborate meal to survive. It is performance art at its best and grandest, rivaling or I’d even assert surpassing opera, in its all encompassing production. The audience is a participant in this theater, and all the senses are engaged, touch,smell, taste, vision, hearing.

      (Here’s where I put in a plug for one of my favorite books from college -- The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life by Erving Goffman)

      When we wear perfume, we don’t become the art, but we become part of the experience of the art, or wait, maybe we do become the art..we are enveloped in it, and others are the audience to our presence inseparable from the fragrance.


      Commodities cannot be art:
      Commodification or commercialization also doesn’t act to disqualify a human endeavor from being art. Art has always been a commodity. In the past it was only the rich who could afford it. One could fete the democratization of art by the commercialization of it. If multiple copies can be produced and made affordable to more people, maybe that’s a good thing.


      You write that "our contemporary tastes in perfume are largely determined by fashion and, as you so astutely point out, marketing."

      This statement could be made about many things including painting, music, dance, literature, dogs. Think about the riots after the impressionists exhibit, or the performance of the ballet “The Rite of Spring” -- examples of art that went against the current popular taste.

      I think a comparison with the visual arts can be helpful here. The aroma chemists are much like the pigment manufacturers. What revolutionized painting was first the invention of collapsible tin paint tubes, and second, the commercial production of new and affordable pigments. Until then painters had to mix their own paints and do batches fresh each day, since there was no method for storing the pigments. It was these technological innovations that facilitated the work of the Impressionists. Plein air painting became possible, and a much broader array of colors were available to experiment with. And the fragrance manufacturers are akin to the pigment manufacturers.

      When there is money to be made and something becomes commercialized, there does develop a certain mindless adherence by the masses to the things that the “experts” select, and the industry develops and selects; Even the so called artists can become conformist in their own narrow ways: Fashion designers only working with models of a certain body type; choreographers who create the pas de deux in the straight jacket of the male supporting the female; composers who always place the soprano voice as the melody or leader in the composition.
      -NS

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    5. Reply to Your Reply Part 2:

      The Great Works of Perfumic Art:
      When you ask where are the great works of perfumic art, I think its important to distinguish what is ‘popular’ with what is ‘art.’ And great works of art need to be understood from the context of their time period. Hieronymous Bosch’s paintings come to mind as an example of painting that couldn’t really be understood until people looked into the historical context. The symbolism in his paintings were clear and obvious to his contemporaries, the religious pilgrims who picked up the souvenir pins, on their pilgrimages. And how about the ridiculousness of playing Bach solo violin partitas and sonatas with an Italian bow instead of the German bow?

      I can believe there are great works of perfumic art that exist. But with all arts, the debate is what is “bad” or “good” and how to tease that apart from what is popular or fallen out of favor with the audience. And understanding perfume as an art is essentially in its infancy in the West, so there is no wonder this is such a messy and energetic debate.

      [and how commercialism complicates identifying "great works of art" is debated in many areas: e.g. Thomas Kinkade self styled "painter of light". I'm not willing to assert that what he created wasn't great works of art, just because he figured out a way to commercialize and sell tons of copies of his works.]

      Museum of Perfumes:
      Then there is the question of whether one can preserve art that is ephemeral in a museum, or archive. Again, Merce Cunningham would say no, you cannot preserve an ephemeral creation. But what is the harm in trying? We’ve got to start somewhere, and if a perfume museum is stocked with products from the corporate fragrance makers, where is the harm? If consumers can continue to develop a vocabulary for the critique of fragrances, and understand each creation in its historical context, then not all is lost to the passage of time. And we can push back against all the self-styled experts, get them to clean up their act, or find new experts, and push the perfumers to see themselves in a different light if they so choose.
      -NS

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    6. Part 3

      You write
      “The major disagreement arises, in debating whether perfumery is art or design, because those who exalt perfumery as an art wish to regard the object in its own right, without attention to its context or the intentions of its creators and the conditions under which it was produced. Yes, some perfumes are beautiful, but that does not suffice to make them works of art. Those who insist that perfumery is design are focusing on the context and the process.”
      ... Daniela Andrier .... said: “I do think it takes a creative soul to make fragrances, but I don’t think it makes us artists.”

      Art or Design:
      I tried several times to respond to these ideas but find that I cannot. They are just too jumbled up and nonsensical.

      There is no way one can assert that “beauty” and “lack of context/process” = art , whereas “context” and “process” = design. Juan Miró designed a huge tapestry that hung for a while in the main hall of the National Gallery of Art, East Wing. He didn’t manufacture it however. He had it made by technicians. Does that make it any less a work of art? And that’s only one example. And in my earlier post I mentioned other works of art that could not be understood independent of their context. In fact the field of art history is all about understanding works of art in their context and process.

      And Daniela Andrier’s comment, neither heads nor tails can I make of it. An artist is a creative soul. Just because the artist has sold that soul to Mammon doesn’t make them any less of an artist or creative soul.

      What I get from underneath your writings, is a lament that the Western fragrance tradition has failed to consider in what way it is an art form. And perhaps starting with and thanks to Turin and Burr, and all the rest of you who have joined in the dialog, Western people are waking up and are newly appreciating, judging and prodding this art form to reclaim itself. Why haven’t Western perfumers seen themselves as artists first and artists for hire second?

      And you are right to point out that in perfume criticism there needs to be a vocabulary, and regular criteria by which we can critique and talk about perfumes. But I’ll have to leave my comments on that for another day.
      Thanks for giving me so much to think about and say!
      -NS

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  3. Reply to Girasole, cont'd.

    Again, wine offers another telling comparison and perhaps a more apt one. Who are the wine connoisseurs who set the prices on fine wine? Well, there's an entire culture devoted to wine as well, with magazines such as “Wine Spectator” offering consumers plenty of advice on good buys and excellent wines. But, ultimately, all of this is created by the wine industry itself. A few years ago I watched a film, “Mondovino” which criticizes the corporatized wine culture, pointing out that, in reality, the critics for wine magazines are also consultants for wine companies. Hmmm.... sounds familiar...

    As in perfumery, in winery, the “experts” and the houses (wineries) are in a collaborative arrangement. In Mondovino, the director attempts to criticize the trends induced by wine critics: the oakification of white wines; the Merlot-ization of red wines, et cetera. Precisely the same thing can happen in perfumery, of course.

    In fact, I'd go so far as to argue that our contemporary tastes in perfume are largely determined by fashion and, as you so astutely point out, marketing. We are bombarded by marketing campaigns which link certain perfumes to glamorous images, inducing in us a desire to be like the models or celebrities depicted. What, after all, are celebrity perfumes, if not a clever marketing scheme for capitalizing on the fan base of a celebrity? But once the perfumes are produced, people will buy and wear them, and then they become habituated to those smells and will therefore buy them, or similar perfumes, again.

    To take an example, sweet patchouli is a very popular scent right now. We are used to smelling sweet patchouli, and after wearing a number of perfumes with this demeanor, turning to a classic chypre or floral aldehyde may be impossible. Such perfumes may even seem repugnant to people accustomed to fruity-floral or sweet-laundry perfumes. Such “classics” just do not smell good, relative to what the wearer is used to smelling.

    So which are the great works of perfumic art? Honestly, it's a mystery to me. Tommie Girl? Badgley Mischka? Sécrétions Magnifiques? Dzing!?WHAT?????????????????????????????????

    Thank you so much for stopping by again, Girasole. Your comment has opened up all sorts of excellent possibilities for future discussions here at the salon!

    Bist du ein Gott? Mir wird so licht!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi, hahahahaha my mother would say: Nein, sie ist der Geist, der stets verneint.
      Have a good weekend, Girasole

      Delete
  4. AnonymousJanuary 6, 2013 12:06 PM
    Reply to your Reply Part 1
    In no specific order:

    You refer to necessity for survival:
    I don’t think necessity disqualifies a certain human endeavor from being art. Look at clothing --we need clothing to survive does that mean that there can be no such thing as the textile arts? Ikkat, batik, brocade...

    And similarly with food. Not that every meal is a piece of art, but a seven course meal with wine pairings, where each dish and beverage are a symphony of flavors, textures, shapes and colors served in a setting of carefully staged lighting, setting, and props, is most definitely art. Lord knows one doesn’t need to eat such an elaborate meal to survive. It is performance art at its best and grandest, rivaling or I’d even assert surpassing opera, in its all encompassing production. The audience is a participant in this theater, and all the senses are engaged, touch,smell, taste, vision, hearing.

    (Here’s where I put in a plug for one of my favorite books from college -- The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life by Erving Goffman)

    When we wear perfume, we don’t become the art, but we become part of the experience of the art, or wait, maybe we do become the art..we are enveloped in it, and others are the audience to our presence inseparable from the fragrance.


    Commodities cannot be art:
    Commodification or commercialization also doesn’t act to disqualify a human endeavor from being art. Art has always been a commodity. In the past it was only the rich who could afford it. One could fete the democratization of art by the commercialization of it. If multiple copies can be produced and made affordable to more people, maybe that’s a good thing.


    You write that "our contemporary tastes in perfume are largely determined by fashion and, as you so astutely point out, marketing."

    This statement could be made about many things including painting, music, dance, literature, dogs. Think about the riots after the impressionists exhibit, or the performance of the ballet “The Rite of Spring” -- examples of art that went against the current popular taste.

    I think a comparison with the visual arts can be helpful here. The aroma chemists are much like the pigment manufacturers. What revolutionized painting was first the invention of collapsible tin paint tubes, and second, the commercial production of new and affordable pigments. Until then painters had to mix their own paints and do batches fresh each day, since there was no method for storing the pigments. It was these technological innovations that facilitated the work of the Impressionists. Plein air painting became possible, and a much broader array of colors were available to experiment with. And the fragrance manufacturers are akin to the pigment manufacturers.

    When there is money to be made and something becomes commercialized, there does develop a certain mindless adherence by the masses to the things that the “experts” select, and the industry develops and selects; Even the so called artists can become conformist in their own narrow ways: Fashion designers only working with models of a certain body type; choreographers who create the pas de deux in the straight jacket of the male supporting the female; composers who always place the soprano voice as the melody or leader in the composition.
    -NS

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    Replies
    1. Hello, NS, and thank you so much for returning to continue this conversation! I am moving your comments down so that I can reply to each one separately.

      First, regarding the question of commodification and the status of perfume, I think that there may be a general confusion here. I am not categorically denying that perfume can be art. I just deny that most of it is, because I think that most of it is produced by "noses for hire," according to the specifications of clients, which often appeal to market data.

      In such cases, the perfumer is not expressing his or her values so much as designing a product to satisfy the requirements of the brief, which I strongly suspect are more often than not dictated by business concerns. When the properties of the product itself are determined solely and wholly by profit motive, then, no, I do not think of it as art.

      None of this means, and it certainly does not imply, that artists cannot sell their work. Obviously, they do, so that's not the important distinction. The distinction is whether the work was produced ONLY for profit or to express the artist's values.

      When a perfume is produced by appeal to market data, with the aim of selling the maximum number of bottles, then, yes, I do indeed believe that its beauty is irrelevant to the question whether it is art. There is a common and naïve conflation of "goodness" and "art" among perfumistas, who assume that because something is beautiful, therefore, it is art. When I tried (apparently unsuccessfully, since you found it "nonsensical"! lol) to explain the distinction between process and product, that is precisely what I meant. Is it still unclear?

      Do you think that the Grand Canyon, for example, is a work of art? Or does it matter at all to you that such a gorgeous thing was not produced by an artist? Do you wish to say that because of its aesthetic properties alone it is a work of art? We speak loosely in this way, of course, when we compliment a chef on a meal, saying “It's a masterpiece!” What we really mean is that the meal was a delight to consume and to behold.

      Just as I believe that people who write ad copy are not literary writers (though they may well be, when they are writing other things), I do not believe that someone who creates a toilet bowl scent for a company according to requirements determined by market surveys is doing art. The perfumer is designing a scent. This seems so obvious to me that I have a hard time understanding how it could be "nonsensical" to you.

      My basic concern here is that if we start calling everything 'art' then nothing is art. I believe that there is a distinction, and while some perfumers may be artists, many are not, because they are working for people who determine the properties of the product.

      If you have access to Netflix, you might want to take a look at the PBS Nova miniseries episode on the "Mystery of the Senses: Smell". I reviewed it here (the text is under the review tab). It shows Sophia Grojsman in a struggle to produce something pleasing to her client. She is not doing art, because she is not expressing her own values but attempting to satisfy someone else's.

      Now, you could reply that her client is the artist, and that is a possibility, I own. It will turn on where the client's specifications came from. If they are purely market-data generated, geared only to maximizing company profit, then I'd have to say that the client is a business person, not an artist.

      More to follow, but I wanted to clarify that point! ;-)

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    2. quick response
      To me the grand canyon is not a work of art. Art is a cultural construct - it is something that humans do (not necessarily humans exclusively -- bower birds come to mind). The Grand Canyon is something made by the Creator of all things -- God to the theists, the big bang to the non-theists.

      you write:
      "Sophia Grojsman in a struggle to produce something pleasing to her client. She is not doing art, because she is not expressing her own values but attempting to satisfy someone else's."

      I would call that a commissioned work. And again one can look down through history to see how many "works of art" were commissioned and produced specifically to meet the goals and taste of the client. I would still call it art.

      Am I calling everything art? I'll have to think about that. I take your point on the toilet bowl scent. But that brings me back to the distinction between fine art and commercial art or applied art.

      How much creativity is actually involved in creating a toilet bowl scent that will really sell? What degree of creativity is involved? Is it just a question of putting various combinations of molecules under test customers noses and having them vote, then that would seem not to be art to my mind.

      I can see what you mean about the corruptive effect of Madison Avenue. (I hesitate to use the word capitalism).
      _NS

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    3. And one more thought I can't resist! And I thank you for the opportunity to share thoughts on your blog pages!

      Tell me if I have this right: you're saying that what many of the perfume houses are doing is identical to the seller of the toilet bowl scent. They are putting combinations of molecules under the noses of test audiences trying to figure out what will sell, and then how to sell loads of it with the best marketing campaign. I'd have to agree that there doesn't appear to be much creativity or artistic energy in that endeavor, and the perfumers are merely hired hands, with talent and creative energy, but no choice in how to exercise it.

      I can see your point about the seemingly corrupting influence of capitalism or commodification. But that was just the sort of thing that Duchamp was reacting to when he "created" his sculptures, Fountain and Bicycle Wheel. And even his work ended up commodified.

      I just don't know if there is a bright line between art and non-art. Maybe like the difficulty of defining obscenity ("I know it when I see it" -Justice P. Stewart).
      So this debate has gone on for many years in many different areas. And maybe what's important is not that one or the other side is right, but the debate itself. That the answer to the question is not important, only the question itself...
      -NS

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    4. Yes, that is EXACTLY what I am saying. In the short film "Mystery of the Senses: Smell", that very point is driven home unforgettably, because Grojsman is working down the hall from the perfumers designing scents for toilet bowel cleaners and shampoos, and from the looks of things, she is just as much under the yoke of the managers as are the other, no-name perfumers hovering over toilets and sinks.

      This was all rather shocking for me to see, given my esteem for Sophia Grojsman. Among other things, she expresses her discontent at having been asked to produce a scent for men, saying that her area of expertise is women's floral accords. She observes that the powers that be at IFF have decided that she works better under pressure so "now they all step on my neck." This does not sound like an artist working in an atelier to me.

      But the main point is exactly what you just said: that in these sorts of contexts (she works for IFF, and I'm sure that the situation is very similar at other such companies), it's hard to see why we would want to say that the perfumer is an artist just because she makes perfume, which we happen to love, while admitting that the toilet bowl cleaner scent-makers are not artists but designers.

      As a matter of fact, most people in the world appear to regard perfume as a toiletry, so they would have no problem with assimilating the two cases, the person who designs a toilet bowl cleaner scent to make the bathroom smell good, and the person who designs a perfume for people to wear to smell good and attract other people, etc. (whatever their view of the function and value of perfume is).

      Now, as far as the commodification question is concerned: yes, the art world itself has undergone so much of this, that these distinctions start to seem entirely arbitrary and dubious, so I do agree with you that, in the end, we are talking about gray areas. What I want to resist are global proclamations either way. It is simply not true that all professional perfumers (working at IFF and elsewhere) are "olfactory artists".

      Interestingly enough, there are fine artists who have used scent as their medium, and they are referred to as "olfactory artists". They are not perfumers. So to apply the term which applies to them to perfumers globally seems to me to be a big mistake.

      I have more to say in response to some of your earlier points, but I wanted to jump in here to affirm your characterization of what I meant to illustrate by the example of the perfumer who produces toilet bowl cleaner scents.

      Okay, just one more for now: You made an excellent point above about Daniela Andrier and how it doesn't really matter what she thinks. Granted, she could be wrong. (According to Socrates, the last person to ask about the meaning of a poem is the poet!) Furthermore, there are plenty of corporate hacks who would love to be exalted as artists, knowing full well that they will produce anything for anyone, provided the price is right. From their perspective, being labeled “artists” may help them to land new and better paying jobs!

      more to follow...

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