Art History in Perfume Advertising: Pleasures, Taboos, Magic - ONLINE CLASS
Taught by Jessica Murphy
Jessica Murphy is an art historian and educator who works in visitor engagement at the Brooklyn Museum. She’s also a freelance writer and she happens to be obsessed with perfume, so she’s been contributing fragrance reviews to the leading perfume blog Now Smell This since 2007 and teaching at the Brainery and other venues since 2015. She’s always looking for new ways to connect her passions for art, fragrance, history, and popular culture. Jessica blogs at Perfume Professor.
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Inside their decorative bottles, perfumes are ephemeral and virtually invisible products---tinted liquids designed to evaporate as soon as they're used. For advertising's purposes, the experience of smell needs to be connected to the experience of sight. In this quest to promote scent through images, designers have often turned to art history for inspiration, quoting or appropriating works of art to create a mood, make a statement, or enhance a perfume's prestige.
In this illustrated lecture, we'll look at advertisements that have used famous (and not-so-famous) works of art to sell perfume over the past century. Can these ads lure us to the perfume counter by catching our eyes and engaging our visual intelligence? Is a picture worth a thousand sniffs?
