With help from Base Design, the Manhattan institution is updating its branding
ENLARGE
While it isn’t among the myriad issues I lose sleep over, I do miss those giant colorful banners, the size of tall-ship sails, that once hung from the Metropolitan Museum’s beaux-arts facade advertising the exhibits inside. They were replaced by more discreet signage several years ago.
When you see them now in photographs or movies they evoke a bygone era.
So it was with some trepidation that I learned recently that the Museum of Sex, on Fifth Avenue in the Twenties, is updating its branding, too.
“One of the challenges from Day One was describing what the Museum of Sex was and wasn’t,” Dan Gluck, the museum’s founder and executive director, told me over the phone.
I frankly thought they’d done a pretty good job. Say what you will about sex, it is one of the strongest brands out there.
The original logo, conceived by graphic designer Michael Bierut in 2002, included an “X” that was bolder than the other letters.
ENLARGEI always thought that both obvious and clever. But apparently it no longer satisfies the museum’s evolving mission. “It wasn’t the whole story,” Mr. Gluck explained. “It rang too much of erotica. We’re not an erotica brand. We’re trying to build a Kunsthalle for human sexuality.”
So Mr. Gluck commissioned Base Design, an international branding agency, to come up with something that better captured his institution’s not inconsiderable ambitions.
I met with two of Base’s partners, Min Lew and Geoff Cook, to review their work on MoSex’s behalf and perhaps, before it was too late, to add my two cents’ worth. I still miss the oversize banners that graced the Met’s facade. I also have a certain affection for erotica, tastefully rendered.
“From Day One, Dan defined the Museum of Sex as an experimental platform,” Ms. Lew explained. “They’re not a collecting museum. We’re no longer playing with, or highlighting, the ‘X’.”
She offered examples of exhibitions for which a bold “X” might leave visitors, who pay $18.50 + tax admission, feeling oversold.
“The Sex Life of Animals”
“Sex In Design”
“Museum = container in which ideas are being bred and conceived,” Mr. Cook added (whether the pun was intentional or inadvertent I wasn’t sure) as images flashed on a screen in their Financial District conference room. “We’re not saying a lot; just capturing their spirit.”
The images included several that weren’t unexpected, such as a pair of luscious female lips and what appears to be vintage erotica of a couple, well, sharing a moment.
There is also an image of Donald Trump that his followers might consider sexy, though it looked to me like a simian engaged in some sort of dominance display.
The BASE team suggested I not read too much into the sample. The point is that pretty much anything could be thrown into that vessel, between the words “Museum” and “of Sex.”
“It doesn’t have to be Donald Trump,” Mr. Cook explained. “The role of this is to make the public understand that at the Museum of Sex there is this breath of investigative process. It’s a playground, a lab.”
One of the more lyrical images involved a topless female frolicking in a field of wildflowers, the “S” and the “E” of “sex” discreetly covering her breasts.
“It’s very Sound of Music,” Mr. Cook observed.
As attractive as the new branding is, I was slightly concerned that MoSex is throwing out the proverbial baby with the bath water.
Mr. Cook told me not to worry. “The people coming for the sex are always going to come,” he explained. “The point is to get the others that might not consider that for a Saturday afternoon.”
I saw his point. Given all the cultural options available in New York City, chances are I’d hit the Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun show at the Met before I would “The Sex Lives of Animals.”
Dan Gluck’s goal is nothing less than to persuade the average Met patron that sexuality, human or otherwise, can be as intellectually stimulating as Surrealism and as elegant as French Neoclassicism.
He isn’t dismissing a future partnership with the Met, either. “The Met has a massive collection of items they don’t necessarily feel comfortable showing to the public,” he said without specifying what they are, but certainly piquing my interest. “I feel they hold back because they don’t want to be too controversial.”
—ralph.gardner@wsj.com