Second semester into the School of Visual Arts’ D-Crit program, founded by the insanely prolific Steven Heller and the insanely lovely Alice Twemlow, and we finally figured out a way to get inside the building. The MFA in design criticism (ed: you can learn this biz?) was launched last year to great speculation and acclaim and curiosity. For one, how to teach a group of people how to do something that most of us have sort of learned in the trenches of doing? And for two, how could any of us uneducated old guard possibly survive the onslaught of more than the usual one-per-year newbies?

Last night’s excuse was a talk, given by Times perfume critic Chandler Burr, author of narrative nonfiction and edifave book The Emperor of Scent. And so we went to the 21st Street department, wedged ourselves into a penultimately back row seat complete with flip-up writing surface, and prepared to learn. If Burr is a wallflower we’re Deanna Troi, so everything was entertaining and full of giggles particularly when he described the acquisition—and testing—of civet. But the lecture, which involved smelling ten raw scents and the perfumes that used them, was also about design, and how to talk about it. Burr sees the construction of a perfume as analogous to the construction of a building; a great breakdown of Calvin Klein Secret Obsession involved a chocolate core with platforms of florals and spices coming off of it, all surrounded by a curtain wall of a synthetic.

There was a little less description of the actual process of coming up with design criticism than we—and, we guess, some of the students—might have liked, but one of the bigger and better truths about criticism is that “it wasn’t what I wanted it to be” is a thousand percent invalid. Towards the end a bright young thing asked Chandler how he comes up with his descriptive passages, ones like perhaps this one, published in the Times in re Secret Obsession:

This is the scent of twilight, but the smell of the shadows lengthening over an early autumn Cobble Hill street: the leaves turning, the scent of the bark of the trees from the park, the sophistication of all those renovated brownstones. And there’s a scent from the local bakery: cake, or spice bread, or cookies.

It’s entirely subjective and that’s entirely the point. And probably worth an entire semester’s, if not year’s, tuition. While Burr talked also about the three objective criteria he used, it’s the subjective ones that make us really want to read him, not to mention the Emperor Luca Turin himself, whose Perfumes: The Guide, should be required on any syllabus that includes learning.

We stalked a few of the students and asked them what they thought of the program. Most of them seemed psyched to be there, if for the access to writers they like and an environment supportive of looking at and thinking about cool stuff. A few of them were a little skeptical as to the real-world applications, but as a wise person once told us, school isn’t about learning how to do real-world stuff. School is about being interested, and engaged, and educated. It’s a bad time to do what we do—to do what anyone does, really—which means it’s a great time to be writing every day, holed up in a writers’ version of a studio. If we weren’t so incorrigible, we’d slip right in.

New Model Army [Metropolis]
D-Crit [Subtraction]
The Arbiters [Surface]