Cabinets of Curiosity

October 24, 2007 at 10:23 am · Filed under LIS768 and tagged: cabinets of curiosity, joseph cornell, LIS768, sfmoma, socialnetworking

I missed class last week due to a business trip to San Francisco. I had a little fun time and visited the SF Museum of Modern Art (great place!) I saw a Joseph Cornell exhibit entitled Navigating the Imagination. Cornell’s art consists largely of boxes and collages in which he displays found objects (he also did experimental film making among other things). Some of his works are cabinets of curiosity which were popular in the Renaissance for organizing objects whose connections are not always obvious. The items are generally interesting to the cabinet maker and the cabinet maker is responsible for defining the meaning of the connections. It occurred to me that social networking via MySpace, Ning, Library Thing, etc is a modern day application of cabinets of curiosity. I guess it’s up to us how we use social networking to define the connections between ideas, people, etc that we find interesting.

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