What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [83]
Frequently, collectors seem happiest in detailing the pursuit of objects of desire. That is not true of Naomi. Her relationship to the works appears purer. “One meets collectors who are interested in showing off their expertise or for whom the story of how they got a certain piece is what occupies them, but she’s not an academic and she’s not a theorist,” Nicholson told me. “She’s also not interested in showing off what she knows. She doesn’t seem to care very much about how she got things. She’s just a very joyous collector who gets a lot of pleasure out of it. She’s not interested in objects for connoisseurship or as souvenirs of experience. She just says, ‘Here’s some cool stuff.’ ”
When the museum opened in October 2005, Naomi, three months shy of her seventy-first birthday, had spent fifteen years hunting, acquiring, and researching erotic art of every period, genre, and origin. She had succeeded in establishing one of the most comprehensive collections of sexual art in the world, and had transformed herself into an authority on sexual art. She had also acquired a library of more than 250 books on erotic art, artists, and collections of erotic art of the East, the West, Japan, China, and France. (The library is available only by appointment: “You can’t have people with sun tan oil touching them every day.”)
“I was totally free to absorb it. The human mind is like a sponge. It absorbs information at any age, if you challenge it,” she said. “Collecting erotic art has been important to my outlook on life, people, and sex. Until I began collecting I lived in a narrow and suffocating world. I became my own pioneer.” She added, “Sometimes you have fantasies and you wonder if they are normal or are they good or bad. Then, when you see the artist portraying things that have been in your mind or experience, it gives you comfort to know there are others out there with the same thoughts, fantasies, and experiences. So it validated and enhanced my own sexuality.”
The World Erotic Art Museum sits almost unnoticed in the heart of South Beach’s Deco district. Despite the area’s reputation for ostentatious sexuality, at midday it looks like nothing so much as an upscale shopping district set in vibrant period concrete color-banded buildings, many of which were funded by organized crime in the 1920s. A small neon sign announces the museum over its innocuous, recessed entrance. The downstairs lobby might just as easily serve as a vestibule for a dentist’s office. By design, there is nothing to offend passing pedestrians, only an unclothed mannequin, decorated with a potpourri of language associated with the erotic, to signal the art upstairs. A visitor can therefore be unprepared, as I was, for the museum’s eclectic excess, which ranges from the sublime to the hopelessly kitsch. Glass display cases lined the walls of three large alcoves and were crammed to capacity with phalluses, amulets, ancient oil lamps, carved boxes, representations of human genitalia, and a panoply of symbols of power, protection, and fertility, the oldest dating to 300 BCE.
A tour led by Naomi is a brisk, dizzying, Alice-in-Erotic-Wonderland feeling. It evoked, for me, the wonder-cabinets that proliferated all over Europe in the sixteenth century, filled pell-mell with marvelous curiosities from global expeditions, which Lawrence Weschler wrote about in Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder. But unlike the disorienting hodgepodge of the Wunderkammern, Naomi has tried to impose some order on the World Erotic