Audience with the boy king

Movie studios have been doing it for decades: churning out sequels that few folks like as much as the original but mobs flock to anyway. This phenomenon took off when independent studios were taken over by multinational conglomerates. With corporate boards minding the profit margins, minimizing investment risk became standard operating procedure.

Now museums are getting in on the act. “Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs,” which opened Thursday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is the sequel to “Treasures of Tutankhamen,” a 1976 exhibition whose three-year U.S. tour set attendance records and gave birth to the era of museum blockbusters. Since then, many museums have begun to function less like scholarly enclaves or intellectual pleasure domes than entertainment centers.

Lavishly installed in a labyrinth of galleries on the ground floor of LACMA West, Tut II resembles a high-end theme park. Ticket booths have been moved outdoors, into tents pitched on the large lawn behind the museum. The grandly theatrical entrance to the exhibition owes more to Disneyland, Las Vegas and the mall at Hollywood and Highland than it does to traditional exhibition design.

Crowd control is a priority. So is making the line of viewers waiting to enter the show -- and to see the next precious object -- look shorter than it actually is.

Before a visitor glimpses a single artifact from ancient Egypt, he must proceed down a long corridor lined with eight faux columns and billboard-size reproductions of Egyptian imagery, make a 180-degree turn, walk back nearly the same distance and pass through a plaster-coated archway into a dark chamber lighted by small sconces. After allowing your eyes to adjust, you turn to the left and peer down a long, narrow gallery that’s even darker, its walls painted pitch black and no exit visible at its opposite end.

There, brilliantly illuminated by spotlights, hovers King Tut’s torso, like an apparition or mirage. Carved from wood and painted in unmodulated blocks of gold, brown and pale yellow, the life-size statue of the doe-eyed boy who became king before he was 10 and died around his 20th birthday looks approachable. His full lips, plump cheeks and arched eyebrows convey friendliness and contentment. The grain of the 3,300-year-old wood, visible through the faded paint, emphasizes the vulnerability of the sculpture and the mortality of the young man. It sets the tone for the show, which is personal and aimed at appealing to schoolkids, who will be trucked in by the busload, and tourists, who will pay up to $30 for the overproduced spectacle.

Visitors exit this shrine-like setting via two nearly hidden passageways behind the sculpture, where the exhibition proper begins in a bright, evenly lighted gallery that features eight pieces, modest busts and small figures carved from wood, granite, obsidian, calcite and quartzite. All portray Tut’s ancestors. Informative labels trace the minor king’s likely genealogy, which the objects vividly illustrate.

To enhance the mood, the gallery has been dressed up with a digitally printed mural of a desert landscape, walls fabricated to resemble the stonework of pyramids, a crumbing prop of a pillar, raw wood lathing hung overhead and, underfoot, thick springy carpeting manufactured to resemble woven straw matting. If Steve Wynn, who brought modern masterpieces to the art gallery at the Bellagio, had been running the Luxor, this is how he might have decorated the high-roller rooms.

In the museum, visitors proceed through a sequence of galleries that alternate between light and dark. Spotlighted objects look more important. The darkness is also intended to make you feel you’re alone with the loot, or at least not packed in a crowded room. Sometimes, there’s no art at all, just wall labels, maps and photographs. Such enforced pauses are meant to intensify the drama of the objects that follow. One narrow room with oddly angled walls and rough concrete floor is supposed to convey to modern viewers the desert atmosphere in which British archeologist Howard Carter discovered Tut’s tomb in 1922. It comes off as bad camp.

The approximately 114 objects in the exhibition -- nearly 50 from Tut’s tomb, the rest from others’ -- do not need such elaborate window-dressing. Nor are viewers well served by the exhibition’s slick packaging of the fascinating, generally first-rate artifacts.

Nearly all of the highlights are located in two extremely dark galleries, where their gold, often gem-sprinkled surfaces are illuminated by tightly focused spotlights. In the center of the first lies the elegantly carved and beautifully gilded wood coffin of Tut’s great-grandmother Tjuya (sometimes spelled “Tuyu”). Around it stand almost two dozen objects from her tomb, including a carved wood head of a cow painted with playful, cartoonish markings, a chair, a chest, various jars and a group of exquisitely detailed shabti, doll-size figures that performed daily labors in the afterlife, so the deceased could relax and attend to more important things.

The largest gallery features a sampling of objects from Tut’s tomb that have been more spaciously laid out. At its entrance, a pair of gilded wood figures depicting Tut as the King of Upper and Lower Egypt shimmer brilliantly. A child’s chair, made of ebony and ivory, reminds visitors of Tut’s tender age, and such regal paraphernalia as a flail, a crook, a staff, a shield, a fan and a mace indicate the responsibilities of the office he occupied, not to mention the powerful state machinery that kept Egyptian society running smoothly.

An intricately inlaid piece of ceremonial jewelry and masterfully carved statuettes of Ptah (with a skullcap of cobalt-glazed faience) and Herwer, a falcon-headed god, stand out as the most gorgeously crafted objects. But they’re quickly upstaged by three even smaller figurines, displayed in an equally dark alcove.

One, made of wood, depicts the god Duamutef, whose job it was to assist the deceased monarch in becoming a god. Another, carved from calcite, was originally made as a portrait of Ankhkheprure but ended up as the stopper of a vessel containing some of Tut’s viscera. The third pint-size piece, also made for Ankhkheprure but used by Tut, is a coffinette in which the boy king’s embalmed liver was buried. Now emptied, polished and opened to reveal delicate inscriptions on its interior, it has an exquisitely modeled exterior adorned with cloisonne inlays of colored glass and carnelian. Not 16 inches tall, it is the centerpiece of the exhibition and its icon. It stands in for the larger than life-size gold mask that starred in the original but has since been deemed by the Egyptians as too valuable to travel.

The exhibitors have included a double-screen video, mounted high on the rear wall, displaying close-ups of the almond-eyed coffinette, slowly circling around its meticulous handiwork. The on-screen colors are more saturated than the gold and azure of the real thing, which looks pale in comparison. The video draws the eye away from the tiny coffin. It’s as if you’re in the cheap seats at a stadium rock concert and have to watch the televised version of the performance.

On the whole, “Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs” doesn’t trust viewers to imaginatively engage its funerary and everyday objects on their own, assisted only by a scholarly label that provides a bit of background information. Instead, the show promotes a single, streamlined trip through history. It feels pre-processed, pre-programmed, pre-digested, as if the whole point is to deliver “the Tut experience” as efficiently as possible, to as many paying customers as can be marched through. But wonder cannot be force-fed.

The exhibition is not organized by LACMA or any other museum. David Silverman, a University of Pennsylvania Egyptologist and curator of the 1976 blockbuster, is the national curator of this exhibition. Nancy Thomas, a curator of Egyptian art at LACMA, oversees the L.A. installation.

The show is a profit-making venture set up by Zahi Hawass, secretary general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, and financed by its American organizers, AEG (formerly known as Anschutz Entertainment Group), which owns and operates Staples Center and is the world’s second-largest promoter of rock concerts, and Arts and Exhibitions International, a company that packages traveling museum shows. Plans are in place in Egypt to use some of the money to build a new museum and to improve existing ones.

For Tut II, LACMA has basically rented its publicly funded galleries to private companies. Unlike other sequels, however, there’s a wealth of works behind the ethically dubious arrangement. If you can block out the bells and whistles, there’s more than enough to set the imagination traveling through time and space, at least until the last two galleries, where video-enhanced displays are so cheesy that Tut’s world of fabulous wealth, fantastic beliefs and great mystery is drowned out by the silliness.

One, titled “The Tomb” is introduced by a computer-generated video that shows the nine nested shrines and coffins in which Tut was buried flying off like some type of high-tech striptease. Inside the middle of the dark gallery, a digital projection on a low platform shows what is left of Tut’s mummy in actual size, like a techno-version of a body lying in state. It’s surrounded by five fantastic but overshadowed ornaments.

The other gallery, titled “The Mummy,” documents a CT scan performed on Tut’s remains in January. This is where the show leaves any pretense to seriousness behind and becomes a pompous, overblown spinoff of the myriad TV shows on which detectives solve crimes via forensic technology.

For the first time in history, the museum gift shop comes as a relief.

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‘Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs’

Where: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd.

When: 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily

Ends: Nov. 15

Price: $15 to $30

Contact: (323) 857-6000; www.lacma.org