LACMA and the MFA Houston Go to Bat Over the World Series on Twitter

For those of us who care about a bunch of millionaires swinging a piece of wood at a small orb and running around a diamond as fast as they can, this year’s World Series has been one of the more exciting contests. After several nail-biters, tonight’s final Game 7 will decide who takes home the trophy. If it’s the LA Dodgers, it would be their first World Series win in almost 30 years, while it would be the Houston Astros’ first title ever.

As fans trash talk outside stadiums, a rivalry of another sort is taking place online between two unlikely adversaries: the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH). With the hashtag #WorldSeriesArtThrowdown, the two venerable institutions have taken to Twitter, trading rhyming barbs accompanied by images of work from their respective collections. Repurposing works by Rembrandt, Ellsworth Kelly, and William Wegman, they’re adding a highbrow twist to this most populist of American pastimes.

“When the Astros made it to the World Series last week, our social media team began brainstorming ways we could engage fans via Twitter,” Kerry Ingram, Interactive Marketing Associate at the MFAH told Hyperallergic via email. “Over the past few months, the MFAH and LACMA have been collaborating closely on an exhibition (HOME—So Different, So Appealing), so some light-hearted banter between the institutions was quick to come to mind. Turns out that independently, LACMA had been thinking the same. We sent the first jab on Wednesday night during Game 2, and the #WorldSeriesArtThrowdown took off from there.”

Since the good-natured feud began, the campaign’s popularity has steadily increased, with LACMA’s most recent tweet garnering 16,ooo impressions according to LACMA’s social media manager Eva Recinos. “When we started there wasn’t a ton of traction,” she told Hyperallergic. “The longer it goes on, the more people are reacting passionately. Now they’re tweeting out their own images.”

As the competition reaches its final stretch tonight, Recinos and Ingram will be at it again, dipping into their museums’ archives for the perfect work to pair with a double play or series’ winning homer.

• In Brief
• LACMA
• MFA Houston