Scent and Subversion By Jeffrey M. Barnes Review of Scent and Subversion: Decoding a Century of Provocative Perfume by Barbara Herman (Lyons Press 2013) The paradox and beauty of perfume is that it operates on multiple levels: the rational and the irrational; the visceral, the cognitive and the aesthetic. Perfume’s power is that it has one foot in the elevated world of language, and one foot in the primal, emotional and dreamlike. — Barbara Herman, Scent and Subversion […]
Nothing to Sniff At By Jeffrey M. Barnes Review of The Art of Scent, an exhibit at The Museum of Arts & Design, Columbus Circle, New York City, November 20, 2012 to February 24, 2013. The Museum of Arts and Design in New York City (MAD) opened its first (and possibly the first) exhibit devoted to “The Art of Scent,” on November 20. With it Chandler Burr, MAD’s recently appointed “Curator of Olfactory Art,” confronted some formidable challenges. One […]
For Want of Wonder By Jeffrey M. Barnes A review of Floating Gold: A Natural (& Unnatural) History of Ambergris by Christopher Kemp (The University of Chicago Press, 2012) [One] continually finds [one]self shimmering between wondering at (the marvels of nature) and wondering whether (any of this could possibly be true). And it’s that very shimmer, the capacity for such delicious confusion . . . that may constitute the most blessedly wonderful thing about being human. So wrote Lawrence Wechsler in […]
