Comic sans is perhaps the single most hated font amongst designers and web professionals, so we and a few others were a bit taken aback when we realized that the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami's website had been infected with the typeface disease.
One Twitterer wondered if it was ironic, another thought perhaps it might be an early April Fool's Day joke. Such is the almost-universal hatred for the font that there's an entire movement and website devoted to banning it.
So why has it taken over the website of an art museum? Because it's art, of course! Also, there is a related video of cute cats.
The font was changed as part of artist Cory Arcangel's current exhibition at MoCA, The Sharper Image.
"Dealing with the aesthetics of technology, Arcangel plays with the
presumable mismatching of the "serious" contemporary art institution's
website font with the 'silliness' of Comic Sans. He is also playing
with the perceptibility of the font, acknowledging that in many cases it
will go unnoticed...Arcangel plays with personal identifications and
marketed associations with particular fonts, much as he plays with the
connotations of Photoshop or the many other formats or programs he
manipulates," says associate Curator Ruba Katrib in the exhibit's catalog essay.
The Brooklyn-based artist's exhibit, which features work from 2002 to the present, opened last week and runs through May 9. Arcangle, who was featured in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, first came to prominence for altering Nintendo games and The Sharper Image utilizes a wide array of mediums including videos, video game consoles, film, photographic prints, sculpture, drawings, web-based work, sound, and performance.
Arcangle's output is pretty varied, but for more of an idea of what you can see, here's his conceptual musical composition pieced together from videos of cats walking on keyboards. It is truly beautiful.
