It’s Monday morning, and the Tab’s Best Bums 2020 has just announced its winner.
Best Bums has been around since Michelangelo’s David, but who decides which peachy posterior is the most callipygian of them all? We sat down with the anonymous judge of Cambridge’s derrières, who agreed to bare all.
How did you get into such an intimate business?
You have to start young to have a chance of making it to the top. At six I saw my first bum. By nine I was judging my village veterans competition, and by eleven I stopped messing around and started pushing myself. I made it to the top of the modelling game – I won the Tate’s Best Post-Modern posterior award at seventeen.
How was the move from modelling to management?
It’s a well trodden path. I was familiar with the different schools of the art – structuralist, classical, post-modern, brutalist… I’d seen it all. I went to Goldsmiths to study ASSNac and the rest is behind me.
How do you feel the Internet has changed the Best Bums art?
I think it’s ruined what used to be such an intimate subject. Each man or woman used to judge their very own best bums competition over the course of their life; now some of the cheeky contests can get a little too much exposure. I prefer Polaroid or papyrus myself.
What do you think of some of the newer, surgically-enhanced behinds?
I can spot implants from 200m. They need to have their own category – we can’t muddy the purist posteriors of the past by comparing them with today’s amazing but amplified asses. We already have a number of categories – professional and amateur, hairy, photocopied – I think the raunchy plumped-up rears of the 21st century deserve their own competition.