As Seen Through the Nose: 2016 COOPER HEWITT DESIGN TRIENNIAL
“BEAUTY” is the ambiguous title of the 2016 COOPER HEWITT DESIGN TRIENNIAL. For philosophers, linguists, and anybody who is interested in what the words we use mean, “beauty” is a confusing concept. The philosopher Francis J. Coleman opened his 1965 article Can a smell or a taste or a touch be beautiful? by writing that “almost all aestheticians exclude smell, taste, and touch from their definition of beauty. These senses are passed over as though it were a thing admitted on all hands that they could never be beautiful.”
According to this view, what we see can be beautiful, but what we smell is never beautiful. Beauty is modality specific: the person we love is beautiful to the eyes, but not to the touch. We like looking at them and we like touching them, but, although we will tell them that their hair looks beautiful, we will not tell them that their hair feels beautiful. The weirdness of the concept of beauty does not stop there. Not only are there perceptual experiences (like smells) that are not called “beautiful”, there also are non-perceptual experiences that are called “beautiful”. Behaviors are sometimes described as beautiful gestures; they appear beautiful to our moral sense. Similarly, a mathematical proof can appear beautiful to our intellect.
The COOPER HEWITT DESIGN TRIENNIAL that continues through August 12 at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York does not display moral behaviors or mathematical proofs. It does however display smells, despite the fact that it is “admitted on all hands that they could never be beautiful”.
The smell display, by Sissel Tolaas — arguably the best-known artist working primarily with smells — is placed between the admissions desk and the gift shop. It is called The Beauty of Decay: SmellScape Central Park and it consists of two parts: a scratch-and-sniff wall, and a row of metal containers that contain odors. The odors experienced by either scratching-and-sniffing the wall, or smelling the metal containers are comments on the smells of Central Park. In preparation for the exhibition, Tolaas explored and collected smells in Central Park for a week in October (when the flora starts decaying).
Tolaas then went to her laboratory to recreate some of the smells. Smelling my way through it, I thought I identified some common fragrance components such as Citronella and Guaiacol. Associations with grass, horse manure, and car exhausts are easily made. Different parts of the scratch-and-sniff wall are supposed to release different smells, but this was not easily recognized when I visited and the entire wall had a nutmeg-type smell.
Are the smells beautiful? Tolaas says in the exhibition catalog that “nothing stinks, but thinking makes it so”. If she believes this than she surely also believes that nothing is beautiful, but thinking makes it so. All language use is based on convention and conventions can be changed. Smells can be beautiful, but whether the smell of horse manure is beautiful is in the nose of the beholder.