Michael Bierut reacts to the reactions to the new logo for The Met by providing an analogy to how it took time to appreciate the genius of Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew:

But I can pinpoint the moment my mind was changed about what music was and what music could be. It was when I heard the first song, disc one, side one, on Bitches Brew. “Pharaoh’s Dance” didn’t sound anything like Chicago. It didn’t sound like anything. It didn’t seem to have any structure, no verses, no bridges. I hated it. But I listened to it again, and then again. I started absorbing its dense, subterranean patterns. And I realized, for the first time but not the last, that something truly new takes time to appreciate and understand.

As Beirut says, the social media we use to consume and create content encourages snap judgements.

This one of the reasons I choose to react to things on this site. I gives me time to sit with my thoughts and decide on the most accurate words to explain myself. This is also why I never use the comments section below articles I’ve read.

Sit with your thoughts. Let them marinate. Sometimes they’ll go sour like milk, and other times they’ll age like wine.

Over at Brand New, Mark Kingsley reviews the new identity for The Metropolitan Museum of Art (aka The Met):

This seems strange. I call it The Met. My friends call it The Met. But this is most likely specific to residents of New York City. As Parisians call it “le Beaubourg” while the rest of the world says “Centre Georges Pompidou,” I suspect most of the world knows it as the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This was generally confirmed over the weekend as I polled friends and students with international backgrounds.

Basically, an odd, if not solipsistic, naming choice for such an international destination.

And Armin Vit in the comments:

The new logo… Yeah, it’s very VERY weird. The first time I saw it, my gut reaction was to smash the banana I was eating into my eyes and then put my face in front of a hungry monkey. Over the past days, as criticism has mounted and I was waiting for either Wolff Olins or The Met to release something better than a blurry photo of the logo, I came to not hate the logo. I don’t love it by any stretch of the imagination and I don’t think it’s traditionally good in any way, but in its uniqueness it really is just a matter of time before it becomes familiar and normal. Still, it’s a weird logo, and it still makes me cringe because those letters were not meant to be in a ligature, much less a double-decker of a triple-ligature. The “T”s in particular, with the half serifs on the bottom are unacceptable and the “E” with its tilted middle serif would have looked great on another wordmark but here it creates a striking imbalance.

I agree with Darrin Crescenzi in the comments. There’s a lot of THE going on in that logo.

Hierarchy anyone?