Per other tickets such as SEARCH-33 and SEARCH-51, it is impossible to find pure-punctuation artists/albums/labels under indexed search. However, this problem also extends to direct search.

One affected artist is ☺

Searching for this artist (yes, simply a unicode smiley face) via direct search yields no results. This makes the artist nearly impossible to find, unless you happen to know an album they are featured on (e.g. http://musicbrainz.org/release/e8bc84da-47fa-4922-a51a-05fec437630f ).