Emoji are works of modern art

The headline is not a personal opinion -- it's the view of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Just around the corner from Trump Tower, MoMA is home to works by the likes of Dali, Lichtenstein and Warhol. Now they have been joined by the original emoji designs from the 1990s.

The 176 emoji are the handiwork of Shigetaka Kurita, and the "12 x 12 pixel humble masterpieces" are now on display alongside the works of other great artists. Emoji changed the landscape of communication, and their addition to MoMA recognizes this.

Originally developed to help Japanese cell phone users to communicate using fewer words, it took a little over a decade for emoji to take the world by storm. They are now a common -- expected, even -- feature of any messaging app, and the arrival of any new emoji is always greeted with a surprising level of excitement. Emoji have been described as offering a "new visual language", and their cultural and linguistic importance is difficult to overstate.

Writing on the MoMA blog about the importance of emoji, Architecture and Design Collection Specialist Paul Galloway says that Apple is responsible for the current popularity of the little images:

Working within the software and hardware limitations of the late 1990s, Kurita created his emoji on a small grid of 12 x 12 pixels. Drawing on sources as varied as manga, Zapf dingbats, and commonly used emoticons, Kurita designed a set of 176 emoji that included illustrations of weather phenomena, pictograms like the ♥, and a range of expressive faces. While successful, emoji remained a largely Japanese concern until 2010, when they were translated into Unicode. This development meant that a user in Japan could send an emoji to a user in France with the same basic image being represented on both ends. Google included emoji in its Gmail as early as in 2006, but it wasn’t until 2011, when Apple added emoji functionality to its iOS messaging app, that the emoji explosion began.

In addition to acquiring the emoji, MoMA is also opening an installation in December that explores the evolution of the handy little characters.