A FEW WEEKS AGO, I mentioned I’d be attending the World Perfumery Congress WPC to a colleague.How very David Foster Wallace of you, he said, teasingly.It’s not a cruise! And I’m taking O Chem!I was WPC-bound to investigate an often-implicit presupposition in the history of aesthetics and reinforced nearly every day in the “fine” arts: that the authority of visual judgment ranks above all in a hierarchy of the senses, with sound as runner-up. I was there to explore how studying a nonvisual experience such as olfaction could help explain the overvaluation of certain experiences in culture (vision