Yaeji was supposed to be on a 26-city tour right now to support the drop of her new album, but, you know. Instead, why don’t we all turn up and listen together? Yesterday, I turned on the title track and watched clouds roll by for a solid five minutes, which I’ll encourage you to repeat today. Do that here and take the weekend to dig into the rest. The best kind of homework.
Masks have always featured heavily in anthropology museums. Did you ever imagine that your own would make the cut? While most of us are focusing on how to live through the Coronavirus crisis, historians are thinking about how to catalog it. Every day that passes is a part of a historical record (exciting!), but how do you collect ephemera for a museum when everything is potentially infectious? So far, most of the preservable artifacts are photos: of masks on the ground, rainbows taped on windows, kids’ messages drawn in chalk. Audio and replicable objects are also above board: interviews with front-line workers, copies of “missing” posters, audio recordings of people’s final voicemails. What would you add?
A natural addition to the Corona museum would be our contemporary set of glyphs. Venmo has been analyzing emoji use in captions and found that this guy 😷 is up 2000% since this all started. And that’s not all. Normally in March, 🏀 reigns supreme. Not so in the time of no sports. ❤️ way up; 🍕 and 🍻 are down. Not a lot of 🎉— in fact, they broke emojis down by category, and “Activity” dropped most dramatically. Check out Quartz’s interactive chart of every symbol’s rise and fall, which you could lift and throw directly onto a screen at MoMA if you wanted to.
Good thing the current crop is so interesting, because the Unicode Consortium has delayed the release of the 2021 emojis due to the virus (new emojis are created by volunteers at tech companies, and understandably, they have other things to do right now). Maybe they’ll give us some cool new quarantine symbols when they get around to it.
If I were curating a Corona exhibit, I’d have a large section on the social divides that the virus is perpetuating, and I’d lead with posters. For every day stuck indoors, one American photographer in France is making GORGEOUS still lifes of flowers, her family, and French-looking food, entitled, “DAY 1, DAY 2,” and so on, and selling them as prints. According to her website, she’s lost most of her clients since everything shut down, and this is her makeshift source of income. While you feel for her— and admire her ability to capture beauty— these immaculate depictions of luxuries feel extraordinarly far away from the realities of the people fighting the virus more actively from delivery bikes, train stations, hospital beds and bedsides. We’ll add to our collection these vintage-looking travel posters satirizing the mobility of the work-from-home set: “Visit your one house plant!” “Surf your couch!” “Take a trip to your own bathroom!” Highly relatable to many, but not to all.