I'd always thought that Wunderkammer or Cabinets of curiosities were an historical relic of early modernity, replaced by, or emerged into, natural history museums.

The cabinets were basically collections of natural specimens, fossils, artifacts, and oddities. The seventeenth-century cabinets were encyclopedic collections usually filled with preserved animals, horns, tusks, skeletons, minerals, as well as other types of equally fascinating man-made objects: sculptures wondrously old, wondrously fine or wondrously small; clockwork automata; ethnographic specimens from exotic locations.

Then I chanced or stumbled upon the work or box assemblages created from found objects produced by Joseph Cornell and I began to wonder. These works relied on irrational juxtaposition (Surrealism) and nostalgia for old objects.

Then we have The Collectors on ABC Television which I struggle within terms of the populism ( anything goes) and the oddity of objects collected. Collecting is big.

What then of the art world? Well, we have an online Curiosity Cabinet, which reaches back to the original cabinets of curiosities. I find it fascinating.

The most popular digital Wunderkammer today is YouTube is an archive awaiting curators; a ‘closet of wonders’ where many of the artifacts of digital empire sit on shelves, waiting either to overwhelm a visitor or to be utilized by savvy new entrepreneurs. The media objects in YouTube are often separated from their original uses awaiting reassembly into something new by bloggers, entrepreneurs and large media companies. These are curators of display and exhibition.