Past voyeur to connoisseur

For the last year or so, Eric Singley has had a daunting task: trying to bring some order to what Plato called life’s grandest and keenest -- but least rational -- pleasure. Singley’s been reading old magazines, meeting with hundreds of artists and plowing through academic studies, all the while digging into the world of sex: Eastern and Western, hetero and homo, primitive to highly technological.

On Friday, the result of his efforts will open in a 6,000-square-foot space on Hollywood Boulevard that last housed a T-shirt shop. The Erotic Museum, of which Singley is the curator, will display everything from Picasso etchings to “Tijuana Bibles” -- tiny 1930s comic books with libido-mad versions of celebrities and Disney characters.

“There’s a lot to be learned by looking at the very lowest,” explains Singley, 33, a dapper graphic designer who manages to be both laid-back and nervously cautious. “It tells you what’s going on outside the art community.”

The museum, a stone’s throw from the Hollywood Wax Museum and the Guinness World of Records Museum, was inspired by New York’s Museum of Sex and is housed in a 1926 Baroque building that was originally a lingerie shop.

On a recent day it was full of workmen. Saws ripped in the background, and buckets of paint sat idly by. But with its polished wood floors and white window moldings, the space was already cleaner than much of Hollywood.

When Singley talks about the design, he could be describing a Beverly Hills hair salon: “The whole aesthetic of the museum is about lots of glass, things suspended off the floor, a lot of lightness and openness.”

Launched by Singley along with three other owners who ran a boutique ad agency, the museum will be aimed primarily at tourists but seems likely to appeal to hipster ironists as well -- as long as they’re 18 or older.

“Sex is something so fundamental to who we are as a species, so closely tied with everything that happens psychologically,” says Singley, sitting beneath a David LaChapelle photograph that includes an artfully placed melon, “that it lets me address a lot of social topics.... It touches on everything.”

Though it’s officially a for-profit business -- so it must pay for itself with ticket sales and a gift shop -- the Erotic Museum in other ways resembles any other museum. Singley and company are building a permanent collection -- already they have two Picassos, 1940s nude photos of Marilyn Monroe, stills from John Holmes’ porn films -- and are assembling materials for rotating shows.

The first shows include “Sex and Technology,” a tableau called “A Century of Sex,” homoerotic drawings of policemen by Tom of Finland, and a projection room Singley calls a “chill-out zone,” which will show gently erotic videos of Maureen Fleming’s butoh-inspired dances.

The technology section will offer a case of sex toys from across the ages, an anatomically correct “RealDoll” and what Singley dubs “a forest of ViewMasters. You can pick one up and go through reels of old cheesecake, Bettie Page and Jayne Mansfield, in ‘50s Technicolor. Or nature photography -- back when you could hire a couple of girls and go into ‘the country.’ ”

And in the best museum fashion, Singley has already begun to complain about the conservatism of his board of directors. “They shot me down on the bonobo,” he says, referring to a display that would have featured a highly sexual primate he sees as having parallels with Homo sapiens. “I don’t know that we want to get people into Darwin at this point.”

Some of his other ideas were vetoed for being potentially controversial, such as plans to exhibit a Japanese video game. “There was one -- it was kind of a schoolgirl thing,” he says. “We had to steer clear of that.”

For the most part, though, Singley is coy when discussing sexual matters. He points to a video game the museum will display, based on the game Quake. “But instead of fighting the other person,” he says, “you’re doing, um, other things with them.”

Last fall, the owners postponed the museum’s opening -- the building needed more refurbishing -- and spent an additional $250,000 on artwork.

But Friday’s opening comes at a time when the museum’s New York equivalent has been experiencing problems. After enormous media interest when it opened in October 2002, it has failed to meet its attendance goals, and it’s had trouble maintaining its visibility. In August, it laid off its two curators and cut its security staff in half. Its inaugural show, “NYC Sex,” is still up.

These problems won’t necessarily repeat at the Hollywood space, but the $9.95-to-$12.95 ticket prices may make it difficult to maintain momentum, especially since the museum is one-sixth the size of its Manhattan counterpart.

And today sex is ubiquitous, in Hollywood and elsewhere. The January ART News magazine, for instance, reports that erotic imagery is widespread at galleries and museums.

“What will it have that you can’t find on the Internet?” Janet Lever, a sociologist and sex researcher at Cal State L.A., asks of the Erotic Museum. “I think it’s a hard sell.”

Says Singley: “I want it to be a whole lot of fun. I keep thinking of the Science Center in Exposition Park ....I want to bring that sensibility here and apply it to serious topics.”

As the museum evolves, he also hopes to initiate a literary series -- “people coming in to read from ‘The Story of O’ or Aldous Huxley” -- and perhaps a film series that would show “substantive” movies like “Midnight Cowboy” or the documentary “American Pimp.”

He’s less interested in showing regular porn films. But then providing opportunities for simple voyeurism, he says, was never his aim. “I think there’s more interesting things to do here.”

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The Erotic Museum

Where: 6741 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood

When: Opens Friday, 4 p.m. Regular hours: Sunday-Thursday, 10 a.m. to

9 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 10 a.m.

to midnight

Admission: $9.95 to $12.95

Rules: Age 18 and over only

Info: (323) 463-7684 or www.theeroticmuseum.com

Collection highlights: “Tijuana Bibles” featuring libidinous Disney characters; famed nude photos of Marilyn Monroe; Picasso etchings; antique erotic mechanical devices