What the Nose Knows - Avery Gilbert [62]
Odor awareness by itself doesn’t make one an olfactive genius. Consider the short, messy life of grunge rocker Kurt Cobain. According to the critic Tom Appelo, Cobain’s personal journals were riddled with scent images: the lingering Obsession of a girlfriend, for example, or Courtney Love’s perfume on his pillow. The biographer Charles Cross thinks Cobain was preoccupied with smell. His favorite book was Süskind’s Perfume: The Story of a Murder, which he read twice. (One wonders whether the hero’s suicide fascinated him as much as the smell angle.) However strong his personal fascination with scent, there is little to show for it in his music. The Nirvana anthem Smells Like Teen Spirit is an exception. It was inspired by an incident in which friends taunted Cobain about smelling like his girlfriend’s deodorant. Kurt Cobain may have been a scent-head, but that didn’t make him an olfactive artist.
THE SECOND TRAIT of olfactive creative genius is empathy: a feel for how other people experience smell and respond to it. One might think perfumers are good at this, but it is not necessarily so. The perfumer works in regal isolation. Marketers enter on bended knee with the latest trend forecast, focus-group summary, and consumer test data. A perfumer seldom meets his public. On the other hand, Eric Berghammer revels in his public. He is creating an entirely new artistic medium from scent; he is the world’s first Aroma Jockey. This young Dutch artist, who goes by the stage name Odo7, has been “live-scenting” clubs, music venues, and commercial events all over Europe. His tools are simple: braziers and hot-water baths to get the scent into the air, and fans to push it into the audience. In a dance club, Odo7 synchronizes his performance to the DJ’s music selections in sets that can last up to two and a half hours. His on-the-job experience makes him an expert in olfactory empathy: from his stage platform he observes how the crowd reacts and he can change the vibe on the dance floor at will. Even in this emotion-laden setting he finds ways to play on smell meaning. He can get laughs from a crowd by wafting baby-powder scent during a heavymetal tune. Originally a graphic designer and illustrator, Odo7 has shifted paradigms completely. He now translates mood and meaning into scent instead of images. One admires his brass: perfumers would never dare to perform in public.
THE THIRD TRAIT of olfactive genius is a well-developed olfactory imagination. Imagination lets the smell-minded artist translate between the senses and invent new ways for scent to speak to the mind and the emotions.
At the core of olfactory imagination is skill at mental imagery. We can bring to mind an odor the same way we imagine a visual scene. With my colleagues Sarah Kemp and Melissa Crouch, I found a way to measure this ability. We translated a well-validated test of visual mental imagery into olfactory terms. Instead of imagining a specific scene (a lake in the woods, for example) and rating how vivid it appeared in your mind’s eye, we asked people to think of an odor (a barbecue, for example) and rate its mental vividness. Compared with civilians, perfumers and other fragrance professionals had more vivid smell