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 last month’s theme, #BestMuseumBum, that has had people enthralled for weeks.
Soon, artworks emerged based on creatures not commonly associated with having bottoms, such as blowflies, mushrooms and fish and categories blossomed to include: bee bottoms, Tudor bums, angular side bum, divine booty, tessellated maenad posteriors, weaponized bum, spectacularly tattooed behind and potato-shaped animal butts.
Photo: AP
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.”
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 that grew by almost 20 inches in 20 years: 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.”
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.
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.
March 24 to March 30 When Yang Bing-yi (楊秉彝) needed a name for his new cooking oil shop in 1958, he first thought of honoring his previous employer, Heng Tai Fung (恆泰豐). The owner, Wang Yi-fu (王伊夫), had taken care of him over the previous 10 years, shortly after the native of Shanxi Province arrived in Taiwan in 1948 as a penniless 21 year old. His oil supplier was called Din Mei (鼎美), so he simply combined the names. Over the next decade, Yang and his wife Lai Pen-mei (賴盆妹) built up a booming business delivering oil to shops and
Indigenous Truku doctor Yuci (Bokeh Kosang), who resents his father for forcing him to learn their traditional way of life, clashes head to head in this film with his younger brother Siring (Umin Boya), who just wants to live off the land like his ancestors did. Hunter Brothers (獵人兄弟) opens with Yuci as the man of the hour as the village celebrates him getting into medical school, but then his father (Nolay Piho) wakes the brothers up in the middle of the night to go hunting. Siring is eager, but Yuci isn’t. Their mother (Ibix Buyang) begs her husband to let
In late December 1959, Taiwan dispatched a technical mission to the Republic of Vietnam. Comprising agriculturalists and fisheries experts, the team represented Taiwan’s foray into official development assistance (ODA), marking its transition from recipient to donor nation. For more than a decade prior — and indeed, far longer during Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) rule on the “mainland” — the Republic of China (ROC) had received ODA from the US, through agencies such as the International Cooperation Administration, a predecessor to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). More than a third of domestic investment came via such sources between 1951
The Taipei Times last week reported that the Control Yuan said it had been “left with no choice” but to ask the Constitutional Court to rule on the constitutionality of the central government budget, which left it without a budget. Lost in the outrage over the cuts to defense and to the Constitutional Court were the cuts to the Control Yuan, whose operating budget was slashed by 96 percent. It is unable even to pay its utility bills, and in the press conference it convened on the issue, said that its department directors were paying out of pocket for gasoline
RSS