ON MUSEUMS / An Explosive Scene, a Lock On the Crowds


Jonathan Mandell


I reprint below my column "On Museums" in today's Newsday in hopes that it will
 encourage more of you to send me your ideas.

JOHN TRAVOLTA pulls a gun on the director of a museum in the new movie
"Mad City," takes her and a group of schoolchildren hostage and
eventually sets off some dynamite. But this does not worry real museum
director Brad Penka.
    "We have maximum security here," says Penka, head of the Barbed Wire
Museum. The particular barbed wire museum that he heads  -  since there
are, as he explains, at least three such museums in the country  -  is 6
years old and located in LaCrosse, Kan., which calls itself the barbed
wire capital of the world. "There are 1,700 varieties of barbed wire,"
Penka says. "We have about 900 of them. We don't use any of it in our
security system."
    Tom Hennessy isn't concerned either. He is the curator of the Lock
Museum of America, which is in Terryville, Conn. (It just locked up for
the winter.) "First of all, there's no windows on the first floor; it's
built like a fort," he says. "I shouldn't say that, because there are
windows in the front. But the rest of the museum doesn't have any."
    Begun 25 years ago, the Lock Museum of America now has a collection
of some 20,000 locks, not all of them from America. Some are antiques
from Europe going back to the 16th Century, and there is one, from
Egypt, that Hennessy originally thought was 4,000 years old. "But a
locksmith visited from New York, and he's Egyptian, and he's seen all
the locks in the museums there, and he said he figures it's 7,000 years
old."
    These days, even locks and barbed wire bring people into museums,
rather than keep them out. Museums are exploding, though not in the
literal way they do in "Mad City."
    When a TV reporter (Dustin Hoffman) is sent out at the beginning of
the movie to cover the story of the budget cuts at a fictional
California town's Museum of Natural History, where he stumbles upon a
gun-toting laid-off museum security guard   (Travolta), his anchor says,
"I see dinosaurs there. I guess the fear today is that the museum might
share the same fate as those mighty beasts."
    If, like most other cultural institutions, museums are having
financial problems, the only thing that the museum world really shares
with the dinosaur is its size. The number of museums is rising steadily.
The United States now has more than 8,000 museums, 1,200 of them art
museums, a number that is 50 percent higher than a quarter century ago.
New museums are opening up all the time, at least 50 last year in
America alone (including a museum of dentistry in Baltimore, four Indian
museums, at least seven science museums and the Lucy-Desi Museum in
Jamestown, N.Y.). This year the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe,
N.M., the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, and the Museum of Jewish Heritage
in New York City are among those that have opened to flash and fanfare.
    Many alreadyestablished museums are greatly expanding, with the
Ukrainian Museum in the East Village, for example, this month having
broken ground on a building that will increase its exhibition space more
than tenfold.
    People are visiting museums more than ever; new attendance records
are being set every year. In the second half of 1989, the Nassau County
Museum of Art had about 20,000 visitors; last year, they clocked
226,000. "As America's favorite tourist attractions, museums ranked
third [behind shopping and outdoor activities]," according to the recent
report of the National Endowment for the Arts titled "American Canvas,"
"well ahead of sports, gambling, nightlife and amusement parks." (Not to
mention John Travolta movies.)
   "I think it's because people are becoming more interested in the old,
in history," offers Lt. Joy Macfarlane of San Quentin, which is the
oldest prison in California, begun in 1852 and still incarcerating
criminals. San Quentin would have been an apt place for the Travolta
character, for more than one reason. For the past three years a small
building on the prison grounds has served as the San Quentin State
Prison Museum. "It includes stuff that goes back to the beginning  -
old weapons and locks and uniforms," says Macfarlane. This is a museum
open to the public  -  inmates are not invited  -  though, as the
lieutenant admits, "we haven't gotten too many people yet." Give them
time, lieutenant, give them time.

  Jonathan Mandell can be reached online about this column, which will
run in this space every other week, at [log in to unmask]




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