An Ancient Boar, a Viral Meme and a Cleveland Museum of Art Mystery

The Boar Vessel at the Cleveland Museum of Art had its 15 minutes of internet-meme fame years ago. That popularity has changed how we understand the piece of ancient pottery today. 

According to knowyourmeme.com, the Boar Vessel meme began in 2015 when a Facebook page posted a picture of the artwork with a back-and-forth text conversation between two people that reads: "Me: 'Hey girl, what's up?' Her: 'I only date Boar Vessel 600-500 B.C. Etruscan, ceramic.'" The meme really caught on several years later, spawning a subreddit page dedicated to it.

The story could have ended there, but the meme created an influx of attention on the artwork. Some archaeologists and historians noticed that the vessel's historical features didn't quite add up. What followed were years of tests and research from the conservators and curators at the Cleveland Museum of Art, all to answer the question: Could this ancient artwork a total fake?

We talked with three members of the Cleveland Museum of Art team — the Conservator of Objects Colleen Snyder, the Curator of Greek and Roman Art Seth Pevnick and the Director of Communications Jacqueline Bon — to better understand how a meme changed the impact and trajectory of this small part of the museum's collection.

Cleveland Magazine: Let's say the meme never happened. Let's say it never popped up. Would this still be on display as an ancient artifact? Is this something that you probably would have poked around on anyway? I'm just curious if the meme is the motivating factor to all this research.

Seth Pevnick: I think I would have looked into it eventually. It wouldn't have been so top of mind, probably. Some of the things that we (did), we can do for all of the objects in the collection, but we don't do X-rays and thermoluminescence or neutron activation analysis for most objects, right? The X-rays we can do in-house, but it's still a big commitment of people's time and energy. The scientific analyses ... we have to send those out to labs elsewhere. And it's expensive, and we don't have an unlimited budget. So, yeah: It may be that the memes made this one worth spending the extra time and money on. We do those kinds of analyses on objects that are especially interesting and important both to our institution and to our colleagues elsewhere.

I know partly because of the meme and partly because of the research that we've done, I have colleagues, curators at other museums, who know about the boar vessel, and I'm sure that Colleen does too. I guess I can't answer your question absolutely, but I think yeah, the meme probably played into it to a certain extent. Certainly, that's one of the reasons why, when it (temporarily) went off view, people noticed and were asking about it. Other things go away, and only a few people notice.

Colleen Snyder: We've had a great number of projects with similar questions, and feel like you're always evaluating what's in the collection and asking those questions, and then we're deciding what makes sense in how to answer those questions. Just to expand on talking about why we might not do it on everything, is: It's not just the expense of time and money, but I think specifically for some of those types of analyses, we have to take physical samples, and so that material is destroyed. It's only a tiny bit of material, and we would only do if it was safe for the object. But we also want to make sure that it's meaningful, that we're really considering, "Is it appropriate to take a little bit of this material that's going to be destroyed in the process of analyzing it to get this answer? Is this what we need to do?"

Hear more from the Cleveland Museum of Art in our podcast, which is streaming on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and more.

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