Much ado about @ being proclaimed work of art

NEW YORK - Any modern art gallery worth its salt is periodically required to raise a hue and cry with some new acquisition, to provoke a chorus of bemused or angry onlookers to exclaim: "But is it art?"

By that token, the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan just put itself back at the top of the big league.

It has announced it has "acquired" the @ sign, and will "exhibit" it as a symbol of our relationships and communications with others in the digital world.

The requirement for inverted commas is telling. The symbol is, of course, not owned by anyone from whom the museum could acquire it, and MoMa's curators haven't yet begun to work out if and how they will give it physical form.

The museum acknowledges this is the first time that it has acquired something that "cannot be had".

Design experts dismissed the move as a stunt, or worse, demeaning to real designers who design real, new versions of the @ for fonts.

Others, though, saw MoMa reinventing its design gallery for a new, virtual world, where so much exists only intangibly on the internet.

And at the centre of the storm is a momentous day in 1971 when a Boston computer programmer, Ray Tomlinson, sent the world's first email, choosing to use an otherwise obscure character to separate a recipient's name from the computer they used.

MoMa credited Tomlinson with being the (unintended) designer of the modern @.

"The appropriation and reuse of a pre-existing, even ancient symbol - a symbol already available on the keyboard yet vastly under-utilised, a ligature meant to resolve a functional issue (excessively long and convoluted programming language) brought on by a revolutionary technological innovation (the internet) - is by all means an act of design of extraordinary elegance and economy," said Paola Antonelli, MoMa's curator for architecture and design, answering the question: "But is it design?"

Unconvincing, counters Mike Essl, design professor at The Cooper Union, one of New York's most prestigious art schools. "I think it is conceptually light.

It's like putting in the letter A. I think that certain typefaces render the @ sign particularly sexy, but I saw this and rolled my eyes. It has the advantage for MoMa of being a recession-proof acquisition. But I'm not going to go to MoMa to see the @ sign."

What will it lead to, asked Steve Kennedy, adjunct professor of typography at the New School.

"Maybe we will wake up tomorrow and discover that the Guggenheim has acquired the ampersand, and then there will be a big rush for the exclamation mark and the question mark."

But MoMa is deadly serious - and dead right to be moving in a radical new direction, says Alice Twemlow, chairman of the design criticism department at the School of Visual Art in New York.

She calls the announcement a bold move, even era-defining.

While some linguists believe it was first used in the fifth or sixth century to fuse the Latin words for "at" and "towards" together in a single symbol, it's also been used as a unit of measurement before turning up as an accounting term, as in "3 @ £2".

- INDEPENDENT

SIGN OF THE TIMES

1448: In one reputed early use, the @ symbol appears before a wheat shipment from Castile to Aragon.

1885: The first typewriter includes the still-obscure sign, mainly used by accountants to denote cost per item.

1971: The first email, sent by American programmer Raymond Tomlinson, uses the symbol to indicate the recipient's location.

2010: With an estimated 210 billion emails sent per day and many other uses besides, the @ sign is one of the most ubiquitous pieces of punctuation in the world.