Hasta La Ideas

“Perfume is not the bottle; it’s the perfumer. We’re going to be purist about that. It’s about the olfactory artist, not the company. It’s not Issey Miyake’s L’Eau d’Issey—which is an ingenious perfume, by the way—it’s Jacques Cavallier’s. It’s not Robert Piguet’s Fracas, it’s Germaine Cellier’s. Her construction of Fracas was the first great Brutalist work of art.”

-Scent critic Chandler Burr, who in his new role as curator of olfactory art at the Museum of Arts and Design is organizing “The Art of Scent, 1889-2011.” Slated to open this November, the exhibition will allow visitors to experience (via diffusion machines) ten seminal perfumes from the last century in a special exhibition space designed by Toshiko Mori. There will be no bottles.

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