When you text a friend telling her to cancel her plans because you’re taking her out dancing, the 💃 emoji you send is not necessarily the 💃 emoji she will see. Although the hundreds of emojis in the emoji keyboard are universal, the tiny pictograms look different on a Samsung device versus an Apple one, or in a Facebook post versus a WhatsApp message.
Curators at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles have taken those variations as an invitation to judgment. In a series of recent social media posts, the museum is rating the appearances of art-adjacent emojis across different platforms and operating systems, leavening scholarly expertise with a liberal sprinkling of cheek.
Twitter’s rendering of the amphora (🏺), a two-handled vessel in which ancient Greeks and Romans stored oil and wine? “Coloration is good, but there’s something amiss with the base.” (Rating: 4 out of 10, with a substantial deduction for its “very lazy decoration” and a meander pattern that “looks like paper clips.”) Samsung’s Classical building (🏛️) drew faint praise: “A perfectly serviceable temple with Doric columns. Proper stylobate, capitals on the columns, attempt at an entablature.” (Rating: 6 out of 10.)
The art-historical jargon comes naturally to Judith Barr, 39, a curatorial assistant in the Getty’s department of antiquities who supplied several of the ratings. So does the tone: As an “embarrassing elder millennial” (her words), Barr is fluent in just the sort of snark that was for years the mother tongue of the social internet.
“Go home, meander design, you’re drunk,” she wrote of one particularly poor take on that Greekest of motifs.
Larisa Grollemond, 41, an associate curator whose graduate work centered on illuminated manuscripts of late-15th-century France and Northern Europe, noticed that the ratings that seemed to resonate the most with people on social media all had something in common.
“I guess the ones that I’m most critical of, people tend to like the most?” Grollemond said of the ratings she supplied, of the castle (🏰) and the open book (📖). Her assessment of Microsoft’s baffling bouncy house of a castle — the rare emoji to earn a 1 out of 10 rating — was unsparing.
“Thanks, I hate it,” she wrote. “What are those towers doing just sitting on the crenelated wall? The lack of windows would be better for a fortified outer wall, but the proportions are all wrong.”
A crenelated wall, of course, is an exterior wall of a medieval castle that has squared-off, toothlike notches along the top through which archers could shoot while remaining defended. But total comprehension isn’t strictly necessary: Simply allowing the expertise to wash over you is also an option.
“When I was first writing them, they did get a little bogged down, trying to do all of these parentheticals and asides trying to explain exactly what all these architectural features were,” Grollemond said. Ultimately, the team decided that they would just “deploy the technical terms and the people who got it would get it, and the people who were curious about it might find out about it or might look it up.”
Or, as Sarah Waldorf, the Getty’s head of social media, put it, “If you know, you know.”
The recent posts are a continuation of a series that Waldorf and her team began in 2020. “We’re trying to do something fun with a personality to really, you know, make Getty feel less intimidating, to be more accessible,” she said.
In interviews, Barr and Grollemond both agreed that unconventional forms of outreach were important parts of the job of a curator in 2026.
“I don’t know that that’s a popular opinion, necessarily,” Grollemond said. “The role of social media and digital collections and how we present them has been, I think, one of the more … lively discussions in the field,” she added with a laugh.
Grollemond dedicates a substantial amount of time to working with Waldorf on lighthearted posts about medieval horoscopes and medieval dating tips for the museum’s website in an effort to make inroads with “people who will never see a gallery show or will never visit the museum in person, or might do so only once.”
“The role of a museum has been changing and morphing, especially over the last, I would say five or six years — since 2020, especially,” Grollemond said. “And there’s been, I think, an increased focus on developing digital-native audiences.”
With the Getty’s main campus, the hilltop Getty Center, set to close for a year of renovations next March, the institution’s digital channels are only going to become more important. (Asked about the future of the emoji-rating series, Waldorf said she was reluctant to reveal too much, but allowed that “we are in conversation about the painting” — 🖼️.)
Remembering the sensation of staring at printouts of emojis, “commenting on, like, the angle of the pediments,” Barr seemed aware, on some level, of the absurdity of the project.
“I think we might be applying an unexpected level of scrutiny for people who are designing these emojis to begin with,” she said.
