BELLES LETTRES

I knew there would be trouble when, in 2013, The Metropolitan Museum of Art hired a Chief Digital Officer and abandoned its metal admission pins. Then, in February 2016, to coincide with the opening of the The Met Breuer, the museum unveiled a new brand identity, adopting “The Met,” spelled out in squat cherry red letters, as its official logo. Designed by Wolff Olins, the company that guided the Tate through its phenomenal expansion, the intent was to bring the museum into the twenty-first century.

The new logo, bright and informal, leaves me longing for the DaVinci-style M that served as the museum’s logo, perfectly, for 45 years. That single letter, based on a Renaissance woodcut in the collection by Fra Luca Pacioli, looked as if it had been hand-drafted, with regulating lines and circles sketched finely around it. It was instantly recognizable, and carried rich connotations: history, geometry, mathematics, proportion, rigor, rhythm, beauty.

The new swollen run-on letters are, by comparison, garish. They’re shaped messily and meet messily, like lumps of Play-Doh. What suffers the most are the E’s, whose center strokes tilt upward like trumpets. The lower E even gives over its top left corner to the soft shoulder of the preceding M. And the two T’s are entirely different: the first kicks its little leg to the left, the second to the right. These no longer letters, they’re cartoons. The Met, one of our country’s most storied cultural institution, has reshaped its logo for illiterates.

May 21, 2016 by Nalina Moses

How do we represent something too horrible to represent? When 27 people, 20 of them young children, were shot and killed at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connectictut last month, many news outlets showed a photo of a police officer and a teacher leading a line of children to safety. Each child held her arms out around the shoulders of the child in front of her, as if it were some kind of playground game. There is fear on the children’s faces and one girl is shrieking. Yet the image doesn’t convey the extraordinary facts of the tragedy: that people are shooting at small children, and that twenty of them are dead. Except for a photo of the bloodshed, what could have conveyed that?

Six days later, after the victims' bodies had been identified and their families notified, The New York Times listed their names on the front page, in white letters, across a black field three-columns-wide and half-a-page high. Since the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC was unveiled in 1982, the act of listing victims’ names in memorial architecture has become standard practice, almost a design cliche. But the listing in the newspaper is especially powerful. It exploits the traditional broadsheet format: words on paper, black and white graphics, and the authoritative Times type face. The big black box, uncomfortably off-center, is severe. The italicized letters are stately, like those on a formal invitation, or a gravestone. Reading the list is wrenching. These children have the kind of enchanted first names (Chase, Grace, Aviella) we give children now, and last names (Irish, Italian, Chinese, hyphenated) that conjure something of their family life. Beside each victim's name the Times lists her age. All of the children were 6 or 7, and reading these numbers again and again is staggering. Even the ages of the adult victims, from 25 to 52, are irrationally young. The list capures a gravity and complexity that most photographs of the event just don’t.

January 23, 2013 by Nalina Moses