The scent tells about a very important social substrate. If we want to call it "art" is useless to consider it as a "niche" product, rather it would be useful to give the fragrance a liberating function that is outside the “daily spraying” (more or less constant or intermittent) and this cosmetic should be a real individual perceptual appearance and not for the masses, as much as clothing or language.
The scent is not just an evocative consumer product, but a product of pure creativity that combines meaning and significance, packaging and creator, with no need of pathetic stories and fairy tales, or even worse: testimonials and false pseudo-aesthetic ideas of luxury.
The expressive power of a perfume, if any, must be the same power that the artist conceived, and not the advertising context or sub-cultural one added ex post to the perfume itself.
The aesthetics mood cannot be and mustn’t be the starting point of the perfume, which I consider a work of art that we must analyze under a psycho-anthropological light, in which the rationalization of a concept is by itself the “opera”. That “opera” differs from the direct and instinctive approach of the visual arts such as painting and sculpture.
As I said there are few opportunities to recognize and memorize the smells and they are relatable to the survival of mankind! The danger, the food and the sex are "occasions" to live or to survive!
The second "opportunity" in which we learn to recognize and identify the odors is our culture, or if we prefer calling it so, subculture.
If we had been taught from an early age to recognize the smell of a flower as a poisonous and deadly one (Aconitum napellus, just a Magnolophyta) this for us would be a bad smell. And if that flower is called DEADLY POISON, there would be no doubt, as the "name" (ie the language) would influence our perception of the flower and of its smell. But if the same flower was involved in a religious ritual and necessary it had mystic values, here it is that our perceived would be to have to do with the "beauty" of a deity, as such, dominates even life and death!
Sorry I will not be tedious, but being my training as an anthropologist, I can only put the human being at the centre of each mechanism: it could be social, cultural, morphological, psychological and developmental or an artistic expression.
If the question is where is placed our olfactory memory, my answer is twofold.
The instinctive type of olfactory memories has a different position from those referred to cultural and the first one dominates also the perception of the latter in all cases where it does not affect a prejudice.
According to the latest research in neuroscience, there is a close relationship between the heart and brain.
The heart seems to have a real "brain" and then its own intelligence. This concept was introduced in 1991 by Dr. Armour who defines the heart as "a real little brain" equipped with its own intrinsic nervous system quite complex and operating independently from the brain processing its own information.
Through the nervous system, the hormonal system and other pathways, heart profoundly affects the functioning of the brain itself. The brain is affected and obey the signals from the heart, but only if there is an instinctive approach, or better when we are speaking about nature and not about culture!
The heart beats and it is in the embryonic form completely unlike the brain that continues to be built up for twenty years or so. It 's probably because of its pre-existence that the organ heart affects primarily on the brain rather than to be driving by brain flu.
I believe that our olfactory primordial memory is right there, in the heart! And I think this is already in embryonic form under the influence of stimuli caused by the experience of the mother. I believe that as long as the culture does not affect our "nature" we continue to store files in our heart and later into our brain. For this I'm sure that each olfactory stimulus is first filtered by heart and then by brain, and I am sure that, if there wasn’t a rationalization of what we are smelling, the heart would always wins against brain.
I could say that the smell of feces is one of the most distinguishable smells for its ancestral meanings.
This odor means our animal nature in social context. If we deceive the brain, camouflaging the smell of dung, the brain does not affect the memory of the heart that would choose that smell.
The example, I always do the following one: three vanillas, a synthetic one, a natural one and the same natural vanilla with very mild fecal (as castoreum). Everybody will prefer the third if they do not know anything about the fecal note.
There is a beautiful example in English language as you can set a memory in your heart and not in your brain, it isn’t “to memorize”, it is “learning by heart”!
Therefore talking about a pure concept of beauty, we can return to the Gothic.
Because of its French origin, in the Middle Age Gothic architecture was called “opus francigenum”. In Venice (Italy), however, it was known as a way of building as "the German" people. The term "Gothic", properly "the Goths", an ancient Germanic people, was used for the first time to indicate this artistic and architectural style by Giorgio Vasari in the sixteenth century as a synonym for Northern, barbaric, as opposed to the resumption of the classical language of Greek-Roman Renaissance.
How can the anti-classic become a new classic?
