Look Who’s Smiley Now: MoMA Acquires Original Emoji #ArtTuesday

Looks like MoMA appreciates emoji just as much as we do!

Though, to be honest, I don’t really understand what most of these are meant to symbolize. Can you translate them all?

The New York Times reports:

Your phone has just become home to a tiny little collection of modern art.

On Wednesday, the Museum of Modern Art announced that it had acquired the original set of 176 emoji for its permanent collection.

These glyphs, designed for pagers made by the Japanese mobile provider NTT DoCoMo and released in 1999, were the first pictographs to make their way into mobile communication. It would take another decade for emoji to explode into an American phenomenon, when Apple integrated its first emoji set for the iPhone in 2011. There are now nearly 2,000 standardized emoji.

Read more.


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