Posted inArt

Kazimir Malevich’s Little-Known Perfume Bottle

Before artists are lionized, canonized, given major retrospectives at major museums, they are people. And when they are people, they are often poor, and so they must find ways to make money. Paul Gauguin tried his hand as a stockbroker, Henri Rousseau worked as a toll collector for most of his life, and Kazimir Malevich — whose retrospective opens at Tate Modern today — designed a perfume bottle.

Posted inArt

The Unpleasant Smell of Lost Opportunities, or How One Museum Show Became a Luxury Boutique

Camille Paglia, who famously polarized artists and intellectuals throughout the 1990s, is back. In her new book, Glittering Images, her mission is to bring closure to an era she feels is full of art-world stunts and isolating pretension, in exchange for a return to art-world appreciation among a general audience and beyond. For her, museums are the locus of this new evolution, and we could not agree more. If museums are the way by which people experience and understand art, and if we want to change that experience or simply get more people involved in it, we must begin by examining the interface.

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Smells Like Art

Christophe Laudamiel is not a purist. “I love fabric softener,” asserts the world-renowned perfumer turned high art dissident. While he’s no snob about lowbrow smells, his exhibition Phantosmia – All But the Smell, which opened on Wednesday at the Dillon Gallery in Chelsea, is an olfactory treat.

Phantosmia — or, the sensation of smell without a physical stimulus — features seven unique scent sculptures that intend to christen a new art form.