Art Can Be What You Smell

The first time I consciously contemplated a museum’s installation-specific smell was in Fernando Romero’s “El Sol” at Kristallwelten in Innsbruck, Austria. Viewers stand in a cave-like, red-lit room under a Swarovski crystal sphere exactly one-billionth the size of the sun. It even sounds like the sun—the University of Birmingham’s School of Physics and Astronomy spent 30 years recording solar aco