It smells exactly like you would expect, and that is rather the point.
The floor
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam has recreated "Pindakaasvloer," or "Peanut Butter Floor," spreading around 800 pounds of smooth peanut butter across a gallery floor, Smithsonian Magazine reported. That is roughly enough, by one accounting, to make some 15,000 sandwiches. Museum workers troweled the spread on to an even thickness, exactly as the artist specified: smooth, never chunky, and monotonously flat.
The installation is a memorial. Its creator, the Dutch conceptual artist Wim T. Schippers, died last month, and the museum staged the work to honor him, following the detailed instructions he left for how it should be done, as The Associated Press reported.
The artist
Schippers first conceived the Peanut Butter Floor in the 1960s, part of a body of work that delighted in testing what could count as art. He was an avant-garde provocateur with a puckish sense of humor, and the piece is exactly the kind of thing that makes some visitors laugh, some scoff, and some stop and genuinely think. "Isn't it fantastic that we are all standing here looking at peanut butter?" he once said of the work, Click Orlando reported.
The experience
The museum has embraced the absurdity. Staff reportedly point curious visitors from the ticket desk toward the gallery with a simple instruction, follow the smell, and a warning is posted for anyone with a peanut allergy. The work, which the museum acquired years ago, is meant to be seen and sniffed rather than touched.
It is a fitting send-off for an artist who spent a career insisting that art did not have to be precious to be profound. Sometimes, Schippers seemed to argue, it just has to make you stop, look at a floor, and smile.
