Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

In June 2015, a new, hyperspecific website named Van Winkle’s went live. It was billed as an online destination for “all aspects of sleep and various nocturnal adventures” by its editorial director, Elizabeth Spiers, formerly an editor at Gawker and the Observer.

In its first week, the site’s pieces included a listicle about dream sequence clichés and a 2,800-word feature on the rise of benzodiazepine prescriptions. Its editor-in-chief, Jeff Koyen, heralded it as “the first editorial venture of its kind.”

What he meant by that had as much to do with its niche subject matter as it did its funding source: Van Winkle’s was not a traditionally independent journalistic venture, but the latest product of mattress startup Casper.

“We have a long-term vision for Casper to become the dedicated brand for all things sleep, and part of owning that category is owning the best content related to it,” Casper CEO Philip Krim told The Wall Street Journal at the time, speaking pure startup. He later added: “The mandate is to create awesome content and that’s it.”

There's a lot of study about how the prevalence of emojis are changing the way we communicate. Linguists debate what we gain versus what we lose when we express sadness by texting a crying face rather than saying, "I'll miss you." But emojis aren't just about communication—they can be art, too.

That's the premise of a fun little campaign from Cantor Fine Art gallery in Hollywood, anyway, which for the past couple of weeks has been using its Instagram account to share emoji-fied versions of the world's greatest artists and their work—from Magritte's Son of Man to Vincent van Gogh to Georgia O'Keeffe's skulls to Keith Haring to Jackson Pollack. The breadth of the project is a big part of the fun (Damien Hirst works surprisingly well as an emoji!), but the campaign's faithfulness to both the artists and the emojis is what really elevates the project.

Emojis are a part of our culture and how we communicate now, for better or for worse, and while seeing a cute lil' Andy Warhol in sunglasses sipping from his can of Campbell's Soup is a fun gag, it does also raise the question of what a pop culture-obsessed figure like Warhol would make of this contemporary visual language. That's a fair bit of heavy lifting for a quirky campaign intended to draw attention to a fine art gallery in Los Angeles whose current show is called "Please Touch the Art," and it's the least pretentious way possible to get us thinking in those terms....