ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Art museums have historically been places for looking - at paintings, sculpture, drawings. Get too close to the art, and an alarm will likely ring. NPR's Jennifer Vanasco recently visited an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York that has plenty of beautiful things to see, but it's a feast for more than just your eyes.
LUCAS: Ooh, that's nice. That's very nice.
JENNIFER VANASCO, BYLINE: My 10-year-old son Lucas is with me in a long gallery, lined with festive hats from the last hundred years or so. One looks like a cabbage. Another is covered with red and pink roses. On the walls are glass vials, each coupled with a hat. You lift the stopper and sniff. What you smell isn't cabbages or roses.
LUCAS: You might like this one. It's interesting. It's so neat.
VANASCO: I don't think we like the same smells. I don't know if I'm going to like it.
(SOUNDBITE OF PERSON SNIFFING)
VANASCO: Oh, no, gross (laughter).
This is the annual exhibition of the museum's Costume Institute, which famously celebrates fashion. We're looking at those elaborate hats, at exquisite dresses, and we're listening to the conversation around us because people have come expecting to see beautiful clothes. They didn't expect the smells.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Which one smells worse?
VANASCO: Someone said, this is really weird that this is what we're doing, smelling hats.
It is pretty weird. But it's also eye-opening or nose-opening.
SISSEL TOLAAS: I'm Sissel Tolaas.
VANASCO: Tolaas is internationally known as the smell artist. She's got a background in organic chemistry. She worked with the museum to bring the smells of these clothes to life. She recorded the molecules they emitted, had them analyzed in a lab and then reproduced those molecules so visitors could smell them. She asked herself, what is the information hiding in the museum's garments?
TOLAAS: So this is an attempt to reawakening fashion beyond the way it looks.
VANASCO: Everyone has their own smell, Tolaas says.
TOLAAS: As unique as a fingerprint - you send me molecules. I take them in. I understand who you are before I see you.
VANASCO: More cultural institutions are experimenting with smell. Earlier this year, the San Francisco Symphony perfumed the air of a concert with the smell of a forest, a thunderstorm, vanilla. An exhibit at the Smithsonian has a cast-iron pot where you can smell the kind of food gold rushers might have eaten. Tolaas is not just recreating what might have been or imposing a generic scent. She's connecting visitors with the lives of the actual women who wore these clothes. A garment emitting one kind of molecule might mean the woman was stressed. Others might indicate she drank coffee or smoked a cigarette or ate meat.
TOLAAS: Looking is important, but we should not forget that every breath we do, we inhale a massive amount of information that bypass the rational that part of the brain, activate emotion, activate the memory. That's essential to survival.
VANASCO: We're now in a small room with three evening dresses, standing in front of a wall that uses nanotechnology. You rub the wall and then sniff it.
(SOUNDBITE OF PERSON SNIFFING)
TOLAAS: Oh.
VANASCO: There's a dark muskiness, a bit of a sharp stink. And then a sweetness.
TOLAAS: Then you turn around. Then you walk up to the dress. Ah, now I understand. Yes.
VANASCO: What I am smelling is the scent of a woman's skin taken from a dress she wore around the turn of the last century. This is a completely different way of experiencing an object at a museum. Smell makes the women who wore these dresses feel present. You feel like you know them. That's because smell elicits emotion, imagination, memory.
ANDREW BOLTON: It's very experiential. It's very intimate, and the idea is that you connect with these objects in a very intimate, very personal, but also very participatory way.
VANASCO: Andrew Bolton is the curator in charge of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He says smell and other sensory information highlighted here like touch and sound are essential aspects of fashion. But most museum visitors don't have access to that when an item is displayed in a traditional way.
BOLTON: It can't be touched. It can't be smelt. It can't be heard. It can't be worn.
VANASCO: But this exhibition restores that information to these clothes, clothes that were once worn by real people who moved and made sound and smelled. Jennifer Vanasco, NPR News, New York.
(SOUNDBITE OF J. COLE SONG, "FORBIDDEN FRUIT") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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