Museum curators have engaged in an online battle of the bottoms, assembling on Twitter to present their most captivating behinds, as part of a campaign designed to engage would-be museum visitors who, with many galleries closed because of the coronavirus pandemic, cannot ogle the buns in person.
The #CuratorBattle began in April, but it was June’s theme, #BestMuseumBum, that has had people enthralled for weeks.
Soon, categories blossomed to include: bee bottoms, Tudor bums, angular side bum, divine booty, tessellated maenad posteriors, weaponised bum, spectacularly tattooed behind and potato-shaped animal butts.
Artworks emerged based on creatures not commonly associated with having bottoms, such as blowflies, mushrooms and fish:
We raise your athlete and instead give you the bum of a drunken fish. Yes you heard me.
— York Art Gallery (@YorkArtGallery) June 26, 2020
Made by Pamela Mei Yee Leung, it was part of a body of work which married animals and humans together to create mythological creatures with personalities. #BestMuseumBum #CuratorBattle pic.twitter.com/qUAa3NgGcG
The Yorkshire museum launched a #CuratorBattle in April. In the competition’s first round, the museum asked other collections to share the creepiest items. A spokesman explained to the Express and Star newspaper that the #CuratorBattles are also, “a chance for museums big and small to share their objects under a given theme to create what essentially become global online exhibitions.”
In the months since the campaign started, themes have included “fantastic fakes”, “mystery objects” and, somewhat underwhelmingly, “tremendous transport”.
But for those suitably behind the times, #BestMuseumBum had the most to offer. For example, the French word for buttocks, English-speaking readers learned, is “popotins”.
#BestMuseumBum : voici notre sélection des 10 plus beaux popotins de l'Histoire de l'Art 🍑 via @franceinter https://t.co/bubXtcVGk3
— Rosalie Kervoas✏️ (@Rosalieblog) July 21, 2020
There was the bottom of a stuffed tapir gone bald from too much petting; 3,500-year-old underpants; and “Henry VII’s burgeoning derriere”, a collection of his combat armour, which grew by almost 20 inches in 20 years:
Same derriere, different decade
— Royal Armouries (@Royal_Armouries) June 26, 2020
You can track Henry VIII's burgeoning bottom through our collection of his combat armours. The Tudor tubster went from a modest 32in waist in 1520 to a whopping 51in booty by 1540.
A 60% increase in trunk junk 🍑 pic.twitter.com/vpx9mQyCpA
The competition provoked responses from around the world, from Canada to Lithuania. In Japan, the Ota Memorial Museum of Art joined in with some sumo bums painted by Hokusai, while the Netherlands’ Freedom Museum shared an “anti-Hitler pin cushion” and the National Motor Museum in Hampshire, UK, shared a glass car mascot that prompted Northampton’s National Leather Collection to comment “dat (gl)ass”.
How about these bums of SUMO wrestlers in our collections? These bums were painted by Hokusai!! #CURATORBATTLE #BestMuseumBum #おうちで浮世絵 pic.twitter.com/DH4rAyQ8Xs
— 太田記念美術館 Ota Memorial Museum of Art (@ukiyoeota) June 26, 2020
Not wanting to be left behind, the Museum of Oxford shared what it called a “shiny flattened peach”: the derriere of a sculpture worn down from people touching it.
"You can look but you can't touch it
— Museum of Oxford (@MuseumofOxford) June 26, 2020
If you touch it
I'm a start some drama."
This sentiment was sadly ignored in the case of this figure.
You see the shiny, flattened 🍑?
That's because people couldn't resist touching her hump (hump). 🙄#BestMuseumBum #CURATORBATTLE pic.twitter.com/7Pb0hZJRZI
When one user asked if the object could be restored, the museum was quick to clarify that the “wearing down of the bum,” was caused during its time on display in the home of Alderman Fletcher, not from recent visitors.
This week’s #CuratorBattle theme, “star objects”, devoted to the most famous pieces in museum collections, will also be the Yorkshire museum’s last, it announced late on Tuesday.
