We've already got museums for everything from sex to television in this town so why not a place to learn about smells, too? Seems like common scents to us (buh-dum-ching!). And lookie here, come next November the Museum of Art and Design will launch its new Center for Olfactory Art (seriously) curated by Chandler Burr, a fragrance writer and the former fragrance editor for the New York Times (yup, that was his title). The center's inaugural show, "The Art of Scent: 1889-2011," will focus on ten perfumes that Burr feels are "stupendous works of art—but are not yet understood as such."
Guests to the museum will be able to interact with the smells, reformatted so as to disperse better by special atomizers placed around the gallery. Additional ventilation will also be installed, naturally. Our favorite part though? "The new center also will have an artist in residence program in which perfumers will work and be observed in MAD's artist studios creating new fragrances over a period of several months." While we've never really thought about it, we guess the folks making smells are doing something interesting and artistic—and since we have no idea how exactly they go about doing it seeing them in action might be kind of awesome. Or incredibly boring. Either way, we'll find out soon enough.
