MOMA Acquires @ Symbol

Believe it or not, the symbol we all use everyday, @ is now part of the MOMA (Museum of Modern Art, NYC) collection of the Department of Architecture and Design. Why and how, well MOMA described the addition to its collection as follows:

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.

On the MOMA website, Inside/Out, you can read further about this inclusion and the history of the @ symbol which is interesting. Now get @ it.