Original Emoji Will Go on Display at Museum of Modern Art

Prior to the "hearts-for-eyes" face, the praying hands and the known eggplant, there was the very first group of emoji -- an assortment of small , now-primitive pictographs that include a natural coffee glass, a blue airplane and a purple face with two carets for eye and a small rectangle for a mouth. But now, these trailblazing symbols have the distinction of being modern art.

The Art gallery of recent Art (MoMA) in Nyc announced yesteryear (Oct. 26) that it has acquired the initial 176 emoji for its long lasting collection, reported The Fresh York Times. MoMA will feature the emoji in the museum's lobby starting in December, as part of an exhibit that includes other graphics and animations.

The original emoji were designed by Shigetaka Kurita for the Japanese people mobile carrier NTT DoCoMo. Kurita created the pictographs, which were released in 1999, on tiny plants measuring 12 pixels by 12 pixels.

The moment smartphones became ubiquitous, emoji became a staple of mobile communication.

"The change from desktop to mobile platforms necessitated a further rethinking of the traditions long associated with written correspondence, " Paul Galloway, MoMA's Architecture & Style Collection specialist, wrote in a blog post on the museum's website. "This was extremely true in Nippon, where the cultural need of exacting salutations and complex honorifics made early on devices impractical for wide-spread adoption. Emoji were a nifty shortcut around this and other problems. "