In an ideal world, I would like to take all of you with me to artists' studios to experience their works firsthand - to see, to touch, and even to smell their art.
The warm waxy smells of art-school corridors reminded me of my own time at Camberwell.
We carry on us what King Lear called the "smell of mortality"; art redeems mortality by giving us a glimpse of eternity.
He finds it a challenge to guide them, as best as he can, toward the things that matter: smell, touch, food, art, love, friendship.
And the Congo itself: its flora and fauna, sounds and smells, language and art, its spirituality.
The natural smell of the art-world scion of a wealthy Hong Kong family was summed up as "cologne but not, as if his body were producing cologne all on its own".
"I like to go there and talk about art and smell all the different things cooking," said Jim Alexander, 65, whose showroom loft bustles with his photographs of Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, and other musicians.
It's the cover art, the smell of the pages.
They are a large factor in human-emitted smells, too from pheromones to bad breath and B.O. Yi's art often involves smell, and her desire to capture people's "smell identities," as Danino termed it, is what first brought them together during Yi's artist residency at MIT last year.
The effect was that of a John Hughes film in smell-o-vision: suburban art, goofy, almost impossible to dislike.
