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] Copyright 1997, Newsday Inc.