"I rejoice that there are owls," Cornell wrote after encountering one in a walk through Long Island woods. He built up this commemorative box with a back-lit illustration from Alexander Wilson's American Ornithology from the early 19^th century. Surrounding the owl are rotting bits of wood, a memento mori habitat that resembles, as curator Lynda Roscoe Hartigan notes, the dioramas at New York's American Museum of Natural History. Cornell's uncanny sense of museums as haunted premises is a major reason why he's such an influential figure right now (far more influential than his contemporaries Rothko or Pollock), when many leading artists are fascinated by installations and varying traditions of collecting, classification, and public display. I'm thinking of Kiki Smith's accumulations of bones and labeled jars for bodily fluids, for example, or of Marcel Broodthaers' display cases from the 1970s that parodied museums. Today's art, as Gertrude Stein said of Hemingway, smells of the museum.