Earlier this year, there was his trip to the Art Institute of Chicago, where he posed with Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” and got busted for snacking in the galleries. Me think we look alike… /W8H5BlvxDHĬookie Monster still frequents art museums. Through his tutelage, each discipline becomes, to the rest of us, digestible. So long as the medium or the message is a cookie, Cookie Monster is lyricist, writer, dancer. Perhaps his best foray into the world of literary arts was a brief journalism gig: he attempted to negotiate a contract that included pay, benefits, and time off, before settling for a cookie. Besides poetry, Cookie Monster often posts cookie-themed versions of lyrics (“Me just took a DNA test, turns out me 100% cookies … ”) he’s been part of the writers’ room at The Washington Post and Jimmy Kimmel Live!, where he struggled to write jokes without employing a cookie reference. As the host of Sesame Street ’s “Masterpiece Theater,” which debuted in 1978, Cookie Monster was Alistair Cookie - a play on journalist Alistair Cooke (who, like Cookie Monster, was a Scorpio). With Misty Copeland, he learns that dancing, too, is a form of art, before the two share a snack. Now anything is a potential cookie, and cookies make anything more beautiful. As a baby, he was “mild-mannered,” never having tasted a cookie things changed after his mother baked a batch. In “Cookie Monster’s Foodie Truck,” Cookie Monster is a curious but ravenous chef, continually clearing the pantry.Ĭookie Monster was born Sid Monster on November 2 (year unknown). But Sesame Street has always utilized the arts as its own kind of exploratory education: the animated spots produced collaboratively with the Keith Haring Foundation the Renoir painting exercise the very French Salvatore Dada the myriad instances in which the gang paints, writes, and cooks. In 2012, boosting its already robust programming, Sesame Street incorporated a STEAM curriculum, integrating the theatrics of music and visual art into programs designed to teach math and science. He grants young viewers access to it, then eats it biting a Cézanne certainly skewers its austerity, but only in the name of education. His reimaginings of famous poetry on Twitter, his public appearances in museums, his numerous stints in writers’ rooms: Cookie Monster, this newly christened media-savvy figure, eats everything, but he seems to eat a lot of art - he seems, in fact, to really love art, and literature, too. I couldn’t imagine that I’d admire, later, how he simultaneously lampoons and reveres the institution of art, rendering it delightfully - delectably - accessible. “Me don’t know art,” he explains, “but me know what me like: food.” See moreĪs a child, I deeply loved Cookie Monster, his sloppy gluttony and goofy humor. Cookie Monster loves to eat, especially cookies, and it takes great pains to quell his imagination - his pareidolia is specific, interpreting any stimulus as dessert. The film takes ancient mythology and the kindness of new friendship as its dually intertwined themes, but it’s titled in the spirit of Cookie Monster, the true protagonist, who nearly eats works by Paul Cézanne, Philippe Rousseau, and James Peale. The two then liberate the spirit of a young prince, whose soul had been trapped in an endless purgatory. Once inside, Cookie Monster would become enamored with a painting of Amedeo Modigliani’s mistress, Jeanne Hébuterne, not for its plaintive beauty for its potentially esculent quality: “See pretty picture with lady inside/It look delicious, me fit to be tied!/Me love to eat it with sugar and cream/But no no no!/Me know the rules!/Picture exciting, but not for biting! ” As he sang, a trio of blue angels encircled him like a wreath: “ Don’t eat the pictures, no, no, no/When you go to museum! ”ĭon’t Eat the Pictures is a one-hour Sesame Street special in which Big Bird gets locked in the Met while searching for Snuffy. This particular field trip was illuminating he announced before even entering, “Oh, boy! Cookie Monster in Metropolitan Museum of Art! Me going to find great painting of something important - like coo-oo-oo-ookies. It was 1983 when Cookie Monster took a life-altering trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the first of several special visits Cookie Monster has since made to the institution. Cookie Monster as a journalist on Season 49 of Sesame Street (photo by Zach Hyman, courtesy of Sesame Street)

The monster within us painting