Emoji at MOMA: Considering the original emoji as art

摘要

In 2016, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York announced that it had acquired forits permanent collection the original set of 176 emoji characters developed in 1999 byJapan’s telecommunication provider NTT DoCoMo.MoMA also organized an exhibition ofthe emoji in the museum’s lobby with the title “The Original Emoji, by Shigetaka Kurita,”thus highlighting its historical significance and the role of the designer.This paper exploresnew and critical yet under-discussed issues surrounding MoMA’s acquisition and exhibitionof the first emoji set.What happens when emoji enters an art museum? What can theMoMA’s accession and exhibition of emoji tell us about emoji, about art, and about therelationship between them? I will examine the discourses on the MoMA’s emoji accession,which reveal two positions against the emoji as art: a conservative view that emoji is notart and thus should not be in the museum and a revisionist effort to frame the emoji as adesign innovation rather than as art.But I draw attention to the MoMA’s exhibition of theemoji, which I analyze as a materialized display of the originally virtual characters.Usingtextual and aesthetic analyses together with theories of art, I argue the emoji at MoMA isart.