Ants and Butterfly

What are perfumes for? Watch the video and find out!

Credits

The Ants and the Butterfly was produced by Squideo from an idea and a script by Chiara Brozzo, a philosopher at the University of Birmingham interested in the value and function of art who has written on fashion and perfumes.

As Butterfly observes, a pleasant scent is often a good way to attract partners in nature. The Ants in the video are quickly on board with this: as many other animals, they also use scents for this purpose, as well as for other signalling and communication purposes.
Odour is central to how ants recognise and communicate with each other: if they recognise each other's smell and know they are from the same nest, they collaborate. But if they do not, they can be very aggressive towards each other. Queens smell differently from Workers!
You find out more about ant colonies in our video, The Tortoise and the Hare. You can see Butterfly again in our video, The Wolf, the Snake, and the Butterfly.

In recent decades, many previously unthinkable objects, such as Marcel Duchamp’s porcelain urinal, Fountain (1917) or Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes (1964), which are reproductions of commercial packaging, have entered the realm of artworks. This realm keeps expanding, leading to the following questions: What is art? Why is something art?
This video approaches this more general question from a specific angle: could an object that is typically made to be useful and serve a specific purpose be art? Perfumes are a fun case-study for this question. Indeed, perfumes are usually thought of as serving a specific purpose: making their wearers smell nice.
The recent history of perfumery, however, hints to greater complexity. Some perfumes evoke places or emotions. The perfumes Un matin d’orage by Annick Goutal and Après l’Ondée by Guerlain aim to evoke a meadow after a rain shower, and Dzing! by L'Artistan Parfumeur is meant to evoke a circus, complete with the leather of saddles, cotton candy and toffee apples.
Such perfumes lead to mixed reactions. But, even if we do not like them, it’s hard not to recognise their creativity and originality.

Above: Brillo Box, from Princeton University Art Museum. Below: Après l'Ondée by Guerlain.

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