There was something missing, and I couldn’t quite place it. 

A few months ago, I went to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. It was a fantastic experience. For once, I wasn’t in a museum for work, this being a summertime family excursion. Still, whenever I’m in a museum, I can’t entirely switch off the work brain. I was intrigued by their current marketing campaign, which connected their collection to our five senses. Or so I thought:

Upon closer inspection, I realized that they had sneakily replaced the sense “smell” with the action verb “do.” Huh. As I was taking a photo of the poster, I looked over at my daughter and asked “What happened to smell?” She gave me that quizzically annoyed look that tweens have trademarked. Once again, her dad was at a museum of priceless artifacts, photographing the marketing materials.

“What....?” She gestured more than said. 

“What did smell do?” I asked again. “Clearly this is a list of the five senses but they left out smell.” 

(Measured sigh). “I dunno, Dad. I guess they figured people didn't need to smell American history.” And then she locked her arm in mine and shunted me toward the exhibit on Transportation in America.

Still, it made me wonder – not for the first time – about the largely absent role of smell in the world of arts and culture. The forgotten sense, if you will. At its core, culture is sensual experience. “A feast for the senses!” — announces many a season brochure across the land. Visual Art and Dance are the pinnacle of optical sensation. Music the apotheosis of aural. Opera and Theater are treats for both the eyes and the ears. There is a whole children’s museum devoted to tactile experiences in Philadelphia called the Please Touch Museum. And of course the entire discipline of Culinary Arts is, as they say, a Taste Sensation.

And yet smell lingers by itself.

Smell in the Culture?

I wondered why all the other senses have their own cultural forms whereas smell has none. So I did a bit of research. While I did find a few examples where smell took center stage — an exhibit on famous perfumes, an experimental art installation in Berlin called “Smeller 2.0” — it was hardly what one would call a burgeoning cultural form. It was more of a whiff at best. The few examples I was able find perhaps explained why we don't routinely go to the “Scentphony.”

The few smell-centered artistic events I could find all seemed to have some fundamental difficulty in working with smell as a stand-alone form. There is the mechanics of producing and dissipating an artificial smell, the requirement of having appropriate time between scents to allow for “palate cleansing” (nostril cleansing?), and perhaps trickiest of all, making sure not to overwhelm the audience.

So perhaps this helps answer why we don't all have subscriptions to the local Odor Opera, but I still believe that smell can have a meaningful impact on a cultural experience. We often talk about the need for culture to be relevant and immediate for our audiences. Of all five senses, is there any more immediate sense than smell?

Some interesting smell facts: Smell is the first of our senses to develop, and it is fully developed prior to birth. It is our most primal sense. Our smell sense ties back to the limbic system in our brain, the so-called “lizard brain.” As the limbic system is also where long term memory and emotion lives, it isn't surprising that smell can trigger some of our earliest and most visceral memories. For me, the odor of British Sterling cologne will always trigger memories of my dad. Fresh mint takes me to my backyard as a kid, age four. Stale coffee = church basement. (That one may well be universal). One study in Britain found that 85% of people surveyed were instantly sent back in time to childhood… upon smelling a crayon. I'm sure you could conjure your own personal smellection as well.

And because it is so primal, perhaps it is best to treat smell broadly and carefully in the world of culture. I can imagine a production of The Nutcracker-gone-wrong that pumps out the smell of chocolate then coffee then tea then gingerbread, and by the time the Sugar Plum Fairy comes out the whole audience is gasping for breath (...or at least very, very hungry). No doubt, to best deploy smell in arts and culture, it should be broad and subtle.

Smell Done Well

The few places in culture where I’ve found smell deployed well, it has, in fact, been done broadly and for very simple effect. In each case I’ve found, odor is not the primary element, but it plays a supporting and very important role.

By far the best use of smell I’ve come across, is at the Black Country Living Museum in Dudley, England, not far from Birmingham. “Black Country” is the colloquial name of that part of England. It got its name during the Industrial Revolution, when this area was a major producer of coal, coke, iron, and steel. It was dubbed Black Country for the seam of coal running through it, and the soot that covered the land. At its peak years of industry, it is said that during the day the sky was a perpetual twilight, black with smoke. The Black Country Living Museum recreates this time on its 26-acre open air campus, having relocated buildings from throughout the region to imagine a town as it would have looked during this time period.

Jack Rubin, Tessitura CEO, with our wonderful guide at the Black Country Living Museum, aboard a period trolley

I visited the Black Country Living Museum a few years ago with Jack Rubin, our CEO. Our tour guide was an incredibly knowledgeable young woman, wearing period dress, who walked us through the recreated streets of the Black Country in that era. Workshops, vehicles, warehouses, a police station, a pub. It was a feast for the eyes. And also the ears.

At one stop along the way, a blacksmith shop, we had a demonstration from a period-costumed blacksmith. As he worked, we heard the hiss of steam from a red-hot piece of pig iron being cooled in water, and the clang of the hammer as he molded a brand new nail before our eyes. And touch — as he handed me the still warm nail which had moments before been red hot. (Extra perk: I got to keep the nail!) 

We even experienced a bit of taste — with a candy shop selling authentic sweets of the era.

As Jack and I were walking up the path back to the administrative offices to meet with the BCLM team, I stopped in my tracks. No one had pointed this out to us, but in this moment of quiet contemplation before our meeting, my lizard brain spoke up. I noticed a smell that was unmistakable from my youth, when my family would vacation in the mountains of West Virginia. I smelled coal.

I pointed it out to Jack. And he smiled with recognition: “Yeah, you’re right. Wow.” Of course the Black Country Living Museum smelled, subtly, of coal. That’s why it was called the Black Country after all. The thing about coal is: while you can see it and touch it, the most fundamental way to experience coal is through its smell. They had done it — the Black Country Living Museum had incorporated all five senses into a complete and profound experience. 

  

Since that experience, I have started to sniff around for other cultural organizations that are enhancing the experience through simple uses of smell. Intentionally or otherwise. One example is The World of Speed in Wilsonville, Oregon. It is a motorsports museum that smells unmistakably of motor oil. Their education programs take place on premises in a working automotive bay, where teens learn how to maintain their own vehicles. Thus, the motor oil is truly authentic — it seeps in to the gallery space from the adjoining education area. Still, they likely have it in their power to remove the smell or cover it over but have chosen not to. It is in no way overpowering. Like the Black Country Living Museum, it is nearly subliminal. To me, the full experience of these gorgeous machines, enhanced by a soundtrack of muscle car music of the 1960s, is really “driven home” by the smell of oil on metal. It is a complete experience.

World of Speed Motorsports Museum 

Pungency

My “Around the World in 80 Smells” would not be complete without the one example thus far where smell has been deployed simply, but in no way subtly. This was at the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart, Tasmania — a museum that has not only provided Hobart with a massive spike in tourism, but also quickly made a name for its shock value.

Andrew’s colleagues John Jakovich and Karyn Elliott at the Museum of Old and New Art in Tasmania, Australia 

When I visited there in 2016 with colleagues Karyn and John, there was an installation called Cloaca Professional, 2010 by Wim Delvoye (it is still there). Each morning at 11:00 am, it is “fed” a slurry of food which it then “digests” for the next several hours. The pièce de résistance, is at precisely 2:00 pm each day, when this contraption will “excrete” what it has digested. Just as a zoo or aquarium will have a feeding time for the penguins or the otters, at MONA they advertise the feeding time for Cloaca. They also advertise the Pooing time:

As you might have guessed by now, when we visited, this was more than just a feast for the eyes. It was authentic enough in its science, that by around noon onwards, if you walked into the gallery, you were enveloped by an unmistakable, olfactory wallop of poo. It was quite gross. And yet! ‘Twas a feast for the senses that I shall not soon forget. 

(It was also, for my daughter, yet another moment I had fallen short as a father. “How could you go to Tasmania and see Pooping Art and not take me with you?!”)

Cloaca Professional, 2010 by Wim Delvoye at Museum of Old and New Art 

A Lingering Thought

Poop Art aside, as the world of culture continues to evolve and change, it is genuinely worth considering the role of aroma in creating a complete experience. Some of our most cutting-edge colleagues are considering ways to make arts and culture more immersive through technologies like virtual, augmented, or mixed reality. Is there also a simpler and equally impactful role for the fifth sense to provide greater immersion for our audiences? How about a performance of Debussy’s symphonic work La mer, accompanied by the smell of salt air? Or a gallery of Remington sculptures from the Old West underlain with the smell of sawdust and whiskey? It could even be fairly low tech. Would our early music friends consider Bach’s Coffee Cantata with a nice German Kaffee brewing backstage?

The smell of coal centered me in a historic time and place at the Black Country Living Museum. The scent of motor oil completed, for me, the gestalt of American motorsports at the World of Speed Museum. And yes, to answer my daughter’s exasperated comment that day at the Smithsonian, perhaps there actually is a way to come up with the smell of American History. Wouldn’t it be fun to try?

Or perhaps I’m sniffing up the wrong tree. All joking aside, there is a hint of something in all of this: How can we in the world of culture can find effective ways to connect cultural experiences with the limbic “lizard” brains of our audiences? That foundational, wordless place we all have inside us. A place that only sense memory can reach. Whether it is through smell, sound, sight, touch, or taste, how do we tap deeply into that place in our audiences? If you believe, as I do, in the power of culture to make us whole, never stop exploring how to engage your audiences as deeply as possible.

(But truly, one pooping art installation in the world… is likely enough.)