The New York Times has a whimsical article on MoMA’s refurbished logo and typeface. While winking throughout about how nobody will ever know the difference, the article also showed the depth of thinking and craft that goes into even the things we never notice. It turns out, for example, that the original Franklin typeface had lost its character and flair somewhere over the past decades, as the article explains:
Within this whimsy, however, lies a fundamental disconnect between the business of art and just plain business. Excellence and obsession with detail makes great business sense when the consumer can recognize the difference, and pay extra for it. But great art is built on excellence and obsession that often goes unnoticed by its audience. From the perspective of critics, one performance or artwork may be profoundly better than another. But the vast majority of viewers or audience members honestly couldn’t tell one from the other.
A business focus would suggest that we minimize these tiny and unperceivable increments of excellence (after all, they lead to much higher costs and aren’t recognized by the consumer). The artful manager, on the other hand, sees that the exceptional moment of connection is all about those insignificant details.
