Museum Curators Are Battling Over the Best Bum on Twitter

What new activity did you get up to during lockdown? Well, for museum staff across the world, a lot of time was spent looking for particularly shapely posteriors within their collections. Responding to a challenge from the Yorkshire Museum in the UK, museums and galleries globally scoured their collections for interesting or nicely formed behinds and replied to the wonderfully nerdy #CuratorBattle challenge #BestMuseumBum.

After the Yorkshire Museum shared this picture of a shapely Roman statue, some fascinating butt related contributions emerged. Examples shared spanned all historical eras and themes, from the expanding derriere portion of 16th-century English king Henry VIII’s suit of armor, contributed by the Royal Armory Museum in the UK, to a collection of 18th century Sumo wrestler bum prints painted by the legendary Japanese artist Hokaui and contributed by the Ota Memorial Museum of Art in Japan. As this challenge shows, a nice bum is a timeless subject that knows no borders.

The challenge was also accepted by natural history museums and art galleries, with contributions such as the popular bee bum from the Grant Museum of Zoology in London and this drunken fish bottom from the York Art Gallery. 

The reasoning behind #BestMuseumBum and the #CuratorBattle? Keep up public interest in the thousands of fascinating objects held in museums around the world, many of which are still closed.

Speaking to the Express and Star newspaper in the UK, a spokesman for the Yorkshire Museum said, “It is a chance for museums big and small to share their objects under a given theme to create what essentially become global online exhibitions. We have run a variety of different themes over the weeks, but best museum bums is proving one of the most popular yet—it’s great to see museums around the world sharing their cheekiest objects.”

The Yorkshire Museum continues to run new challenges for their fellow museums every Friday. The recent #FantasticFakes resulted in things like this supposed fur-bearing fish being brought to people’s attention. Next time I go to a museum, I know what factor I will be judging exhibits on anyway.