How many other museum tours have a roof-top wine and Hershey's kiss intermission whilst collaboratively planning for stage 2 of the adventure?

A New York City speed walk through the Met with Museum Hack

Johanan Ottensooser
Nov 2 · 4 min read

TL;DR: This tour is to normal museum tours what an espresso martini is to a filtered decaf.

Museum Hack is an engaging way to see incredible museums, focusing on things you wouldn’t usually focus on, and teaching in a way you wouldn’t usually be taught.

More importantly, it might be the coolest way to meet like-minded geeks.

On Friday after work, a couple of friends and I headed to the Met for a decidedly disestablishment tour of the Met. We headed to the Pharoah, met the gang and were off!

Note, I will give a few snippets here that capture the feeling of the tour, but I don’t want to give too many spoilers, so consider this a teaser-trailer only.

Art history, but just the tip

Our first stop was to Ancient Greece and Rome, where we learned to differentiate between Ancient Greek and Ancient Roman Statuary …

… but really spent most of our time talking about:

  • much like cam-girls selling their bathwater, Olympians used to get home, bathe in olive oil and then, if they were famous enough, sell that to adoring fans

Dicks of all shapes and sizes.

How the Vatican collected Greek and Roman statuary, then covered their bits with plaster fig-leaves that, with the seasons, ended up cleaving the dicks clean off. And that those dicks are now stored in buckets underneath the Vatican.

How Actors (who wore dramatic masks that at once enlarged their features for the enormous audiences, and at the same time acted as natural bullhorns to amplify their voices) acted pantsless and sometimes adorned themselves with comedic leather phalluses, just to (excuse my phrasing) make a point.

In fact, dicks were a bit of a recurring theme, with middle-ages junk making a showing later in the tour (did you know that enormous middle-ages codpieces were that large because everyone had syphilis, and if you didn’t, you pretended you did because only uncool people didn’t have it?).

This might sound bro-ey, but it really didn’t come off that way. It was still engaging, and we were still learning. What a fun way to get us to look at a tiny Greek statue that we might have otherwise passed by, and teach us a bit about the life of the Greeks by way of their actors and the plays that they performed.

An Oceanic slit-gong used for inter-island communication

Don’t hate me because you ate me

Our next stop was to the Oceania room. A room that I would, to be honest, have strolled through, glancing side to side but probably not stopping.

This tour showed me how wrong I had been, by bringing the room to life with a tale that wove in the history of the Met, its benefactors, Oceanian ritual cannibalism …

… and the intersection of the benefactors and cannibalism (they ate a Rockefeller).

Again, an engaging story, but really also an entry point to a fascinating discussion about colonialism, and the complex history of relic collecting and museums.

A theme that continued through the Latin-American and European wings of the museum.

Museums are F****** awesome, together

Apart from the story-telling, the secret-sharing, the comedy and the roof-wine, one of my favorite things about this tour was how much interactivity there was.

  • Snap a pic in front of your favorite statue in the American Statuary room

While it may sound a bit “ice-breaky”, this was a great way to get to know the other people on the tour: by seeing what they find fascinating.

A porcupine school photo.

Takeaways

  • Museums have a million interesting things that you have never seen

I would not hesitate to recommend this to anyone with even an inkling of nerdiness.

Shoutout to my mate J who is the best adventure friend anyone could ask for and organizes the best possible activities.

Shoutout to Dustin for being the sickest fucking tour-guide, and for being the host of Versus, one of my favorite shows in NYC.

Part of the Active Participation notebook series.

Other highlights:

Dustin introducing us to THE DUCC (pronounced DEWCH), the artwork that the Met paid the most money for, ever.
Jen, myself and a mate barely pulling off being bears.
Historical Keytars of history
Post hack diner feast.

Active (blank)ing

Actively consuming art, music, science, history and culture (with the help of my handy dandy notebook).

Johanan Ottensooser

Written by

Customer Success @ Datalogue. Fintech @ KWM. Cornell Tech LLM v1.

Active (blank)ing

Actively consuming art, music, science, history and culture (with the help of my handy dandy notebook).

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade