You can’t hang them all in the Louvre

The final minutes of Saturday’s men’s basketball final between the USA and France at the 2024 Paris Olympics provided the kind of drama and jubilation viewers hoped for.

With the score close, Steph Curry hit four three-pointers in the final 2:43 and eventually put the game away, garnering Team USA their fifth straight Olympic gold medal.

Those shots, as well as the moments around, created some indelible images. Perhaps none more so than a photo of Steph Curry shooting over France’s Victor Wembanyama, as captured by Getty Images photographer Ezra Shaw.

There was also the moment of Curry doing his iconic “go to sleep” celebration following a dagger three-pointer, which showed up in several images that spread across social media like wildfire.

Between the celebratory nature of the game finish, coupled with the impressive photography that made the rounds in those final moments, there appeared to be one thing that people wanted more than anything else: To hang them in the Louvre.

Fair enough for those two images. However, accounts also started asking for other images that were “great but not spectacular” to get the Louvre treatment as well.

Some even took it a step further. Even though the Louvre was right there in Paris, a few accounts felt that the imagery needed to return to America with the gold medal and hang in the Smithsonian.

It’s just a silly meme but, like “ GOAT ,” wanting to “hang it in the Louvre” has been overextended and overused. It’s handed out too liberally for what started as a reference to the elite of the elite.

And yes, some of the imagery from Saturday’s final certainly rose to the occasion of iconic imagery. But most of it was, to quote Larry David, just “pretty pretty good.” Which is great, but not, like, “hang it in the Louvre” great. Maybe “Hang it in the J. Paul Getty Museum” or “Hang it in the Art Institute of Chicago” would have been more apt.

Is this a silly and arbitrary thing to complain about? Absolutely. But we’ve gotta have standards. The Louvre certainly does.

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