Art History in Perfume Advertising: Pleasures, Taboos, Magic - ONLINE CLASS
Taught by Jessica Murphy
Jessica Murphy is an art historian and museum professional with a longtime passion for perfume. She's been a contributor at the blog Now Smell This since 2007, and since 2015 she's been giving presentations about the cultural history of fragrance via the Institute for Art and Olfaction, the Brooklyn Museum, the Corning Museum of Glass, and other venues. Her writing about scent has appeared in Atlas Obscura and Viscose Journal and she's been interviewed by Vogue, The New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, Harper’s Bazaar, Decoder Ring, and other media outlets. She shares her thoughts on olfactory and visual topics at her Substack, Show & Smell.
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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?
