SIGHTS AROUND TOWN : Glassworks : The Museum of History and Art sparkles with a tribute to fanciful crystal creations from around the county.

The holiday season’s festive atmosphere couldn’t find better decoration than in a current exhibit of glass and crystal at the Ventura County Museum of History and Art.

“Masterpieces of American Glass from County Collections” is a show that validates the museum’s very title--as a repository of history and art in the county. Curators Bobbi Dufau and William Orcutt have culled a roomful of fanciful glassworks from around the county.

Still, while a sparkling sight, the show is more about history and craft than anything decorative. Glass artisans have long struggled to gain admission in the elite world of fine art.

If this work lacks the spiritual, emotional or intellectual properties of expression thought to be at the core of fine art, it is well worth the viewing. Like the genial carousel exhibit at the museum before it, the new exhibit goes down easy and leaves the head feeling light. An aesthetic is at work here, and quality is evident.

Intentionally or not, a subtheme of the show relates to the psychology of fin de siecle artifacts. Most of the pieces date from either the turn of the last or current centuries. As a result, there may be a general air of sentimentality, and, plainly, an interest in luminous precious objects triggered merely by a century’s turning.

Without a doubt, sentimentality runs deep around the holidays and the closing of any year. Here, the show begins in the museum’s foyer, where a looming Christmas tree bears the origami and glass ornamental design of Ventura designer Anthony G. Real.

In the main gallery, the glass is organized in cases by type. Taken as a whole, the show is a study in the varying textures, techniques and hues available in the medium.

Iridescent, diamond-like patterns give crystal pieces a bejeweled look. The sense of function in these candelabra and bowls seems plainly secondary to their form. Function is more apparent in an amber flask, even if it is decorated by George Washington’s face in relief.

In one corner sits an especially dazzling and dainty opalescent blue glass pickle jar, lined with a silver frame. It’s hard to imagine stuffing a vessel so elegant and fragile with dills.

Local interest marks the 1903-04 souvenir glasses, slightly larger than shot glasses, made by the Libbey Glass Co. (glass mogul Thomas Libbey was one of the influential settlers of Ojai, leaving his mark in civic planning and development).

Examples of modern-day glass work are impressive--especially an unabashedly frivolous “Partridge in a Pear Tree,” with an 18-carat gold tree (partridge included) embedded upon a glass pear.

But still, we’re drawn more to the antiques. We admire their durable, untarnished elegance and toehold into a simpler age. An 1860 paperweight has tiny pears afloat inside a transparent mass, like fossilized treats.

Tiffany lamps work their own kind of charm, with mosaic-like glass patterns that mimic tapestry and convey an instant sense of Americana.

Artistic Assertions at Ventura College

For those needing an antidote to sentimentality, two one-person shows at the Ventura College galleries aim to provoke.

At the New Media Gallery, Mary Sue Anderson-Turley shows rough-and-ready pieces that are, according to her statement, inspired by jazz, blues and punk music. The pieces are about sheer energy and unraveled traditions.

Neither fuzzy nor dogmatic, Anderson-Turley’s works--manic constructions of canvas, paint, collage snippets and sawhorses--seem like spontaneous combustions. Cut-out images of flowers and cherubs are at odds with the general mode of mayhem in the gallery.

As if flung into being, the works ignore the conventional role of the hosting gallery space, and, in one sense, involve the gallery as an interactive element. In another sense, they trash the place.

Still, though, her work is buoyed by a sense of festiveness rather than soul-baring, thrashing angst. The art manages to evoke an enlightened oxymoron: a punkish joie de vivre .

Over at Gallery 2, Barbara Millman’s work operates on a much more somber and theme-driven level. Millman’s subject is the holocaust, and she deals with it in a way that makes the gallery suitably claustrophobic and oppressive.

Her paintings are graphically organized like expressionistic collages and are often laced with affecting texts. Millman limits her bank of images to several loaded, recurring icons: Nazi flags, emaciated concentration camp prisoners on the verge of becoming skeletons, flames of death, barbed wire.

In the potent painting “The Last Train Ride,” a box car of Jews spills blood, while flames lick the sky above the approaching camp--the final destination.

The sum effect of Millman’s work is chilling on impact, underscoring the basic message here--”never again.”

But on closer examination, the familiarity of these kind of spiky post-punk, post-modernist graphics undermine the more serious intent of the work. This kind of imagery has been seen in too many underground comics and rock albums to be as effective as it should be.

Millman encounters and doesn’t quite resolve an inherent problem faced by artists--how to express strong, ineffable ideas without bumping up against obstinate archetypes that threaten to disarm those ideas.

* WHERE AND WHEN

* “Masterpieces of American Glass from County Collections,” through Jan. 3 at the Ventura County Museum of History and Art, 100 E. Main St., Ventura. 653-0323.

* Barbara Millman at Gallery 2, Mary Sue Anderson-Turley at New Media Gallery, through Tuesday at Ventura College. 654-6468.