I Hereby Acquire “WTF”
By now you’ve heard that the Museum of Modern Art in New York has, er, acquired the @ symbol. Not a sculpture of the symbol, not a patent on the symbol, not a specific visual representation of or specification of the symbol.
MoMA claims to have “acquired” the symbol itself.
To describe/define their approach, Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, writes
The acquisition of @ takes one more step. It relies on the assumption that physical possession of an object as a requirement for an acquisition is no longer necessary, and therefore it sets curators free to tag the world and acknowledge things that “cannot be had”—because they are too big (buildings, Boeing 747’s, satellites), or because they are in the air and belong to everybody and to no one, like the @—as art objects befitting MoMA’s collection. The same criteria of quality, relevance, and overall excellence shared by all objects in MoMA’s collection also apply to these entities.
Post-post-modernist this may be, but it strikes me as a bit of emperor’s new clothes. I take a bit of exception at their use of “object”—isn’t physicality a requirement to acquisition of objects? “Object of affection” still implies something physical in most cases.
Yass, yass, I know…exceptions abound. And MoMA is playing here, of course. They are playing with language, they are playing with politics, they are playing with their own field (of museumology, as it were). I appreciate that modern art as a construct must, by definition, reinvent itself (does anyone feel weird saying that Rand and Wright and Neutra are “modern”?). At some point, one can go too far.
Ultimately, “acquisition” is probably the wrong word here. Perhaps “appropriation” is better?
