Drake's Certified Lover Emojis turned NFTs
Track 20 // Vol. 05: Type Justified
A little over a month ago, before the autumn equinox, the full harvest moon marked a seasonal celebration in Asian cultures. In Japan, the autumn moon viewing festival is called Tsukimi. Like many traditional Japanese celebrations, Tsukimi expresses gratitude—for nature, for the harvest, for abundance. I wanted to include my friends in this spirit as well, so I texted a few of them while I spent a quiet moment looking up at the night sky.
I feel a certain kind of delight when I get to use emojis specific to Japanese culture, like it’s a code I can piece together. In the above text for example, the rabbit refers to lunar associations because of a Japanese folktale where a rabbit pounds mochi on the moon. The emoji next to it is pampas grass used as a traditional decoration during Tsukimi. And the one after that is odango, or ball-shaped mochi on a stick, a common festival treat. (I took a bit of liberty with that one, Tsukimi dango is just white and not on a stick.) Emojis pack a punch; combined together, they convey an unexpected depth of meaning. They serve as cultural references, tone clarifiers, emotional reinforcements, and cheeky symbols. (…Has anyone ever used the eggplant emoji in earnest?)
As a micro-image, an emoji is also worth a thousand words— ‘e’ actually means picture, and ‘moji’ means letter, or character in Japanese. We communicate so much through written, digital means, to the point where emojis convey their own kind of visual language adjacent and supportive to different writing systems. How did emojis arise, and how do they evolve the possibilities of communication and art, in different ways from words and typography?
During the summer of 2021, the emoji became an album, fine art, meme, and NFT series all from one project: Drake’s Certified Lover Boy. An album more known for its cover art than tracklist, it featured pregnant emojis, created by one of the world’s biggest contemporary artists, Damien Hirst. It was strange and funny to some, controversial and off-putting for others, yet seemingly self-aware to all. Drake really leaned into the satire of his sensitive side on this project, as also seen for his video for “Way 2 Sexy,” the album’s lead single. Certified Lover Boy not only launched a thousand memes, but also, inspired a series of NFTs valued at $20 million.
Why pregnant emojis on the cover? This tweet pretty much covers the internet’s theories, but you can read more about the music’s themes in its Pitchfork review.
Track 20 connects the cross-cultural language of emojis to appropriation art and NFTs. How has the internet changed the consumption, aura, and value of art?
Before we begin, let’s do a quick dive into the history of the emoji. We wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for enthusiastic Japanese teenage girls from the 90s who loved paging their besties.
Keith Houston, author of Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks traced down the history of emojis on his blog by the same name. It all started in the mid-90s with Japanese teenagers who loved pagers, or as it was called in Japan, ‘poke-beru’ (pocket bell). One of the largest carriers, Docomo, introduced a heart symbol that became a huge hit among its younger customers. After a few years producing different versions of pagers, Docomo chose to get rid of the heart in its text offerings. As a result, many subscribers bailed from the service. However, they managed to turn this setback into a bigger opportunity as they developed a mobile internet service for their cell phones. Engineer Shigetaka Kurita, who worked on this project, wanted to improve Docomo’s boring text display by incorporating more pictorial and animated effects.
Houston connects how different aspects of Japanese culture inspired Shigetaka Kurita to create the original emojis. Kurita began with images of his childhood, sourcing them from manga.
Kurita elaborates in this Verge article, “In Japanese comics, there are a lot of different symbols. People draw expressions like the person with the bead of sweat, you know, or like, when someone gets an idea and they have the lightbulb. So there were a lot of cases where I used those as a kind of hint and rearranged things.”
Houston also adds additional insight into the visual aspects of Japanese culture:
“More so than in some other countries, Japanese culture and public life are suffused with visual symbolism. Comic books, or manga, are read avidly and universally, and many of them make use of common visual tropes that express concepts or states of being. An oversized drop of sweat on a character’s face represents anxiety or confusion; a lightbulb above their head is a moment of enlightenment. As the first host country in the modern Olympic era to use a non-alphabetic script, the Tokyo games of 1964 pioneered the use of symbols (🚴︎, 🚻︎, ⛵︎) rather than text to help foreign visitors find their way. And that same non-alphabetic script itself provided inspiration: in kanji, the ideographic script that Japan inherited from China, Kurita saw how powerful it was to be able to express complex ideas like “love” in a single character.”
And with that, Kurita designed a font with “one hundred and seventy-six monochromatic but lively icons,” as part of Docomo’s new “i-mode” internet. Today, Docomo is the biggest cell phone provider in Japan with over 40% of the entire market share. When I lived in Japan a decade ago, my basic, free-with-the-cheapest-plan flip phone included an extensive and playful library of animated emojis.
The aesthetics of emojis have evolved over time, looking more and more like images than the simple symbols they started as. Other carriers in Japan adopted and created their own versions of emoji. Apple incorporated Softbank’s emojis (another Japanese carrier) in their iOS2 release, but it wasn’t until 2011 when emojis went fully international with iOS5. Unicode, the industry standard for encoding and displaying most languages, has since adopted them, and now anyone now can submit proposals for new emojis. (Apparently it’s a painstaking process with a lot of waiting and paperwork, but go for it!)
Reflecting on the global impact of his designs, Shigetaka Kurita is most curious about how emojis translate across different cultures and languages:
“I’d really like to know to what degree they’re used in the same way, and to what degree there’s a local nuance. I think the heart symbol is probably used the same way by everyone, but then there are probably things that only Japanese people would understand, or only Americans would understand… It would be great if we could compare, and have that lead to people starting to use things in the same way.”
While emojis first functioned within written language as a digital communication tool, they are at their core, symbols inspired from established animated references. Images made from images, simplified by virtue of screen size. Now, if we shift back to the design for Certified Lover Boy’s album cover, Damien Hirst arranged emojis in a grid, like his famous “spot paintings,” and in doing so, created art from an existing image and concept. But Hirst didn’t stop there, he also launched a series of NFTs called Great Expectations, inspired by the album cover artwork. Images (NFT) made from images (album art) made from images (emojis) made from images (manga). Great Expectations included alternating backgrounds and more variations on the pregnant emoji. For example, some wear hats, different colored shirts, sunglasses, and other accessories, more pixelated than polished. He offered them as 10,000 free NFTs to holders of his previous NFT collection, The Currency.
(Click on it for the full animated effect! Is it just me or does it sound like Thom Yorke made the backing track?)
Hirst described his process as trying “to create an image that sums up the powerful hope filled love, humour & daring truth in the music of Drake for his album cover.”
In a Twitter thread explaining the work he added,
“We worked hard on this, we wanted it to be pop, high and low art, it had to be ironic while remaining iconic. It had to be optimistic and hopeful, international, a thing of beauty that everyone and anyone could relate to and understand, and it absolutely had to be something that looks amazing on your phone.”
While the intent sounds accessible and democratic, a Damien Hirst NFT still costs thousands, but not as much as one of his paintings or sculptures, which go for tens of millions. Instead of art hanging on a wall, the vehicle for display is a screen on an expensive piece of hardware.
After visiting Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project and Nick Cave’s exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art earlier this month, I’ve been thinking about art that reuses found objects into new contexts, à la Marcel Duchamp’s readymade sculptures. Is using an emoji in art a kind of digital readymade, where the source material gains new meanings in different contexts? Or is it more accurate to ascribe this to appropriation art, where objects or images are reused with little alteration, if any. Appropriation artist Richard Prince, for example, has long produced art through controversial practices like rephotographing and copying images from magazine advertisements to Instagram posts, labeling them as his own pieces.
Appropriation art historically has ties to tangibility—a print, a photograph, a sculpture made of found objects, etc. Using emojis as NFTs counts as an evolution of this kind of practice, which ultimately interrogates the ways we place value on art. For example, buying a limited-run vinyl album of Certified Lover Boy runs about $75-80 apiece. (There were no CDs made for this album, to my knowledge.) An NFT of Great Expectations, a very similar image, originally cost $2,000 before it increased in value in resale shortly after its release, hitting $4,500 in November 2021. According to OpenSea, its all-time average price is about 0.78 ETH, a little more than $1,200 at the time of publishing this.
How does quantity and replicability affect uniqueness and scarcity of art—and ultimately, its value, when placed in a digital context?
Walter Benjamin argued that the fast, mass-replication of art objects, ultimately devalues them when he published The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction in 1935. Value also grows from the history of the object.
He writes:
“Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence.”
Its presence in time and space relates to the artwork’s “aura,” a quality, feeling, and effect of the artwork that cannot be translated through its physical, mechanical reproduction. Imagine the difference between experiencing an original Leonardo da Vinci painting in the Louvre versus a printed poster of it taped to a classroom wall.
“…that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art…One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence.”
Mechanically reproduced objects degrade over time, unlike digitally reproduced objects. However, those digital entities depend on the technology that expresses them. Emojis, for example, could have disappeared entirely after pagers faded, yet they survived by evolving with mobile phone technology. In the digital age, pixels are evergreen, but technological disruption determines degradation. Also, our attention spans are short. Aging technology screams for upgrades, or else it reeks of junk. Memes are hot one day, forgotten the next. (Somewhere in a Boomer’s basement, an old VCR coughs a dust bunny.)
What comes of digital art’s “unique existence” as Benjamin determines through time and space, if the internet abstracts those concepts? On the internet, replication actually creates value—isn’t the goal always to go viral? Does uniqueness still determine value here?
Certified Lover Boy’s album cover became extremely popular because it was so “meme-able,” which I’m defining as, “easy to replicate in order to jump on a comedic, topical bandwagon.” Twitter and Instagram accounts from Lil Nas X to Mayor Lori Lightfoot, recreated a grid of multi-color figures riffing off of Hirst’s design. Sure it was short-lived and now perhaps unmemorable, but the moment burned brightly enough to trend on Twitter for the first week of the album’s promotional cycle.
The memes boosted Drake’s project more through cheeky mockery than admiration, and despite the album’s mixed reviews, Certified Lover Boy managed to set a record with 9 of its songs clinching the top 10 spots on Billboard’s Hot 100 Chart, the first artist to ever reach such a milestone. Previously, the Beatles held the record for holding the first top 5 spots in 1964, but those numbers were based on physical album sales and radio play. Drake’s record relied on streaming numbers. What I find so fascinating about this project is how thoroughly it exemplified the internet’s effects on the consumption of art and music. While Hirst and Drake aimed to convey both “high and low art,” both album cover and NFT ultimately transcend these traditions of categorization for how they reveal an evolving digital culture and how the role of technology continues to expand the possibilities of art experiences and their corresponding values.
What is the future value of art that depends on technology, when technology ultimately expires or evolves? And beyond NFTs, how does the buzzy, emerging world of AI-generated art, like DALL-E factor into these ideas around aura, value, and appropriation? Aura vanishes in this context, but perhaps it’s too soon to know, time weaves traditions through our experiences. For now, we are in an era of visual echoes traced back from the past to multiply in future forms.
Thanks for reading.
Wow what an interesting article there’s so much in this I hardly know where to start... thanks for the history of emojis, it’s really interesting to think about the nuances of their meanings across cultures. I didn’t know about Hirst’s project with Drake. I know he gets a hard rap from lots of folks but I think his work is really interesting. Essentially he is constantly questioning what art is and what its value is. And he has done it again here with all the questions you raise about appropriation, originality etc. interesting question about changing technologies and durability too. Thanks for this, so much to think about!
Whoo I can’t wait! This track is so interesting!