Is it possible to review perfume as you would the arts? Novelist Hilary Mantel takes on some of the current bestsellers
Hilary Mantel
The Guardian, Thursday 1 January 2009
In any department store at this time of year there is a reliably comic sight - buyers trying to choose discounted perfumes by sniffing the necks of the spray bottles. Scent makes sense on skin, and only on skin. Why are we such fools about fragrance? Led on by lush advertising, seduced by editorial gush in magazines dependent on their advertisers, we abandon natural discrimination and distrust our own noses. Scents are not so much objects as performances, processes, but we lack a process for appraising them. Book critics can be savagely partisan, opera critics sniffy, and film critics make you choose to stay at home. Could you review a scent as you review these art forms? Yes, I would argue. One word, for example, would sum up Beckham Signature: illiterate. Mitsouko would need a volume of essays.
Where do they lurk, the perfume critics? There are scent blogs on the internet, often well-informed. But most bloggers write carelessly, and, in such a subjective matter, some precision is needed.
More.
"I try to describe with love what I love. My secret ambition is to pierce through the veil: think about a work and then not just describe it but arrive at something, an underlying principal or an underlying emotion and then say what the work's true value and beauty really is." Joan Acocella
Recommended reading
- Baird, George. “Criticality and Its Discontents,” Harvard Design Magazine, 2004.
- Butt, Gavin. After Criticism: New Responses to Art and Performance, Blackwell: Malden & Oxford, 2005.
- Critical Inquiry
- Eagleton, Terry. After Theory, Penguin: London, 2004.
- Hays, K. Michael. “Critical Architecture: Between Culture and Form,” Perspecta 21: The Yale Architectural Journal, 1984. pp. 14-29.
- Martin, Reinhold. Critical of What?
- Somol, Robert & Whiting, Sarah. “Notes around the Doppler Effect and other Moods of Modernism,” Perspecta 33: The Yale Architectural Journal, 2002.
- Sontag, Susan. ‘Against Interpretation’ and ‘Notes on Camp’, in A Susan Sontag Reader, Intro. Elizabeth Hardwick, Penguin: London, 1983.
- Speaks, Michael. “Design Intelligence, Part I: Introduction,” A+U, 2002.
About Me
- Rolf Hughes
- Writer & critic; Guest Professor in Theory and Practice-Based Research at the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design, Stockholm; Senior Professor in Research Design at the Sint-Lucas School of Architecture, Brussels & Ghent; Senior Researcher at the Royal Institute of Technology, School of Architecture, Stockholm.