Cultural Content: Met Gala & May the Fourth 🤘
Two important Internet/pop culture things happen in the first week in May...
Good morning Cultural Content folks,
In this edition we’ll be looking at how cultural organisations tackled two pretty heavyweight cultural references that fall in the first week of May; the Met Gala (on the first Monday in May) and May the Fourth (which social media managers have gleefully converted into an excuse to talk about Star Wars; May the Fourth Be With You.
Both examples this week demonstrate how the format ‘this-pop-cultural-thing-looks-a-bit-like-something-in-our-collection’ can work well, around these specific events, on different platforms, and with difference degrees of nuance.
Met Gala
Ashmolean
See actual post on Instagram
Here’s the Ashmolean; showing us how it’s done. Some great visual metaphors between all those celebrity images dominating our feeds anyway that day, and using that as a hook into some well-paired Ashmolean objects.
V&A
The V&A created a TikTok, which they reposted to Instagram, doing a similar thing but in video format.
Although a repost, the Instagram version performed better that TikTok. This could be because Instagram - for around 48 hours during and after the Met Gala - shows So. Much. Gala. Content.
The Met
This post is not especially clever. It is big though: 443k likes is one of the biggest like counts I’ve seen on Instagram in the cultural sector since I’ve been running this newsletter. What the Gala has become - in terms of a fundraising and brand awareness for the Museum - is pretty damn clever.
Dr Margaret Maitland (National Museums Scotland)
Dr Margaret Maitland is Principal Curator of the Ancient Mediterranean at National Museums Scotland (and is, by training, an Egyptologist).
She was doing her a stellar Met-Gala-looks-that-look-like-museum-objects thread in 2019:
In 2021 she did a similar thing, but also told you something about why the National Museums Scotland objects she’s paired are apt and in keeping with the theme.
May Fourth
Railway Museum
There were more examples than I’ve featured today of cultural organisations doing a May The Fourth Be With You post on Twitter. What I like about the Railway Museum’s is how they’ve leaned in to the nerdiness of it all, and what better way to lead into a Twitter thread that ‘Not so long ago, in a museum not that far away…’
National Museums Scotland
The folks at NMS have their own take on May the Fourth. One that - as a dyslexic - I have to be quite careful with.
May the ‘Forth’ - showing the Forth Bridge in the background - and some truly excellent photoshopping.
That’s it, folks.
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