Museum gets sexy with adults-only tour
THE British Museum is to host an X-rated “Love Hunt”, in which members of the public will seek out the naughtiest items in its collection.
Visitors will be invited to “titter at some semi-pornographic 5th-century Greek pots” and “gawk at the enormous phallus of a Priapus” in an event aimed firmly at adults.
Promising an exploration of the museum’s “naughty and amorous tales”, the treasure hunt will invite teams of visitors to romp through the galleries, identify the relevant objects and take photographs of them.
It is being organised by an external company, Treasure Hunt At The Museum, and follows similar challenges hosted at the British Museum with different themes.
Attendees are invited to “search for the impish Putti” and “vie to capture the beautiful Venus”, from June 16 onwards.
While not organised by museum staff, the event follows a schools sex and relationship education programme based on the museum’s objects.
Speaking at an event in April, Hartwig Fischer, the director of the British Museum, said the workshops were an example of how museums can help to “mitigate” a perceived lack of arts in state schools.
“They [museums] offer protected spaces and offer schools the possibility for pupils to engage with objects and address difficult subjects,” he said then.
“We run a sex and relationship programme that works much better in museums where you have objects that you can relate to and where it is easier to talk about these things,” he added.
Official educational talks use artefacts from Japan, ancient Egypt and Greece to explore issues including pornography and consent, and items from India, ancient Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome to discuss LGBT issues through history. In The Love Hunt, groups of visitors will be given a worksheet containing clues relating to adultthemed objects and images in the museum, which they will then be asked to track down.
Once they succeed, they will be offered a mixture of “intellectual questions” about the subject in hand, or a more lighthearted task relating to it.
In previous hunts participants have been dared to sing in the museum’s restaurant and have been awarded points for overcoming their embarrassment in front of an audience.
Other challenges have required guests to act out scenes in paintings.
The Love Hunt invitation explains: “Throughout the evening you will caper around the museum, finding treasures, photographing them and learning about the artefacts along the way.”
The treasure hunt will take place in small groups during the museum’s regular opening hours.
The British Museum is Britain’s most popular museum or gallery, with 6.4million annual visitors.
The organisers expect Love Hunt to attract adult players, and are braced for interest from hen parties.