Nearly two decades ago, Shigetaka Kurita was given the task of designing simple pictographs that could replace Japanese words for the growing number of cellphone users communicating with text messages.
Kurita, who was working for the Japanese mobile carrier NTT Docomo, came up with 176 of them, including oddities like a rocking horse, two kinds of umbrellas and five different phases of the moon. He called them emojis.
An estimated 74 percent of Americans now use emojis every day, nudging the written word to the side in favor of a medium that can succinctly and playfully convey emotions in a society often more adept at texting than talking.
That marriage of design and utility prompted the art world to take notice. On Wednesday, the Museum of Modern Art in New York announced Kurita’s original 176 emojis would be added to its collection.
The works will be displayed in the museum’s main lobby from December to March with animations and printed designs.
“These 12×12 pixel humble masterpieces of design planted the seeds for the explosive growth of a new visual language,” Paul Galloway, a specialist in MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design, wrote in a blog Wednesday.
“Shigetaka Kurita’s emoji are powerful manifestations of the capacity of design to alter human behavior,” he added.
Museum officials said emojis are the modern-day answer to an age-old tradition of communicating with pictures.
“Emojis as a concept go back in the centuries, to ideograms, hieroglyphics and other graphic characters, enabling us to draw this beautiful arch that covers all of human history,” said Paola Antonelli, a senior curator at MoMA. “There is nothing more modern than timeless concepts such as these.”
Galloway said NTT Docomo provided the emojis in digital files for free. Their acquisition highlights the museum’s expansive vision of what constitutes art.
As far back as 1934, MoMA displayed ball bearings and propellers for an exhibition called “Machine Art.” Another more recent exhibition called “Humble Masterpieces” celebrated everyday objects like Post-It notes and Band-Aids.
In 2012, the museum sparked a controversy when it acquired a collection of video games, including “Pac-Man” and “Tetris” — raising questions about whether the games belonged in the same building as works by Henri Matisse.
The museum countered by saying the video games were icons of interactive design. Other art experts came to their defense, arguing that technology had blurred the lines between high-brow and low-brow.
“The MoMA has been very courageous and taken a lot of risk acquiring these things,” said Kali Nikitas of Otis College of Art and Design. “In a way, it’s not surprising they would acquire these emojis.”
