Joseph Cornell - Cultural References

Cultural References

The Dutch pop band The Nits released a song, "Soap Bubble Box", on their 1992 album Ting, about seeing some of Cornell's boxes in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The song was a minor hit in the Netherlands.

Singer-songwriter Mary Chapin Carpenter imagines Cornell going about his creative life in the song "Ideas are like stars", found on her 1996 album A Place in the World.

The English band The Clientele has a song titled "Joseph Cornell" on the group's debut album "Suburban Light", released in 2001.

Jonathan Safran Foer's anthology A Convergence of Birds is a collection of fiction and poetry inspired by Cornell's work.

The American novelist and short story writer Robert Coover published a series of stories entitled The Grand Hotels (of Joseph Cornell) in 2002. Akin to short fables, the stories refer to various themes and images in Cornell's Hotel series of boxes.

Charles L. Mee's play Hotel Cassiopeia (2006) is based on the life of Joseph Cornell. Anne Tyler's Celestial Navigation (1974) is a fictional riff on being Joseph Cornell.

The cyberspace novelist William Gibson used the finding of mysterious boxes similar to those by Joseph Cornell as a narrative element in his novel "Count Zero" (1984).

The Canadian poet and playwright Michael Redhill's first novel Martin Sloane concerns a fictional collage artist whose works resemble those of Joseph Cornell.

Michael Chabon's "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay" imagines Joseph Cornell at a party hosted by Salvador Dalí. Chabon writes, "Most of seemed to be Americans - Peter Blume, Edwin Dickinson, a shy, courtly fellow named Joseph Cornell - who shared an air of steel-rimmed, Yankee probity that surrounded like a suburb their inner Pandemonium."