Newton's Laws A masterpiece in your pocket?

Author: Thomas Newton

It's the fourth day of spring break and the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City is breathtaking. The space is unrestrained, expanding four stories upwards and glowing with bright light. The exhilaration of the moment is amplified in my knowing that original works from history's most famous artists lie just around the corner.

The first few floors house modern artistic marvels from all corners of the globe, and soon enough Monet's Water Lilies stretch before you, sweeping you away to Monet's private garden. Then follows Dali's The Persistence of Memory, a work that had until recently only existed in textbooks and PowerPoint presentations. On the next floor you are confronted with Mondrian's Composition with Red, Blue, Black, Yellow, and Gray, where the simplicity of the work is a masterful disguise for a painting that showcases an artistic evolution.

Just seeing these works would have made the visit to MoMA worth the effort. Yet then, in the last room, you see something so provocative and so intriguing that all previous works vanish from your short-term memory. There, in a glass case, surrounded by many other works like it, sits a piece of art to top all others: The Neon, a cell phone created by the Japanese cell phone service provider AU.

Hit the brakes, throw it in reverse and back up a few miles. A cell phone that a Japanese woman in the room with the Monet exhibit was using to take a picture is being displayed as art? At the MoMA? What has the world come to? I mean, sure, it's an attractive phone and it has nice features, but does it really merit a place in one of the most prestigious modern art museums in the world?

The truth is, no. In a world where almost all cell phones perform the same functions equally well, the only way for a company to set itself apart and get people to ditch their perfectly good phones for new ones is to create devices that have visual appeal. A simple example is the Motorola Razr. Before Motorola released the now ubiquitous device, it was considered to be a stagnant manufacturer. Now, however, Motorola phones are the "in" things. From the Razr to the Rizr to the Krzr, every phone Motorola releases has substantial aesthetic value.

AU, the Japanese cell phone company, has taken this concept one step further and created a line of phones known as "AU Design Projects." They sport equally fashionable names, such as the Neon, the Infobar, and the Talby, and have looks to kill. Looks that are so lethal, they violently murdered the judgment of several MoMA curators and seduced them into thinking the placement of the AU Neon phone on display was a good idea. Don't get me wrong, the phone is attractive, and even in some ways artistic, but it is still a consumer electronic and comes off in the exhibit as a cheap marketing ploy. The next time I'm in the MoMA, I would like to feel that I am standing in a center for the arts, not a Verizon Wireless kiosk.