The New York Times Magazine MUSEUMS Sex on Display Sunday, June 28, 1998 Manhattan tourists, disappointed at the PG-13-rated Times Square may soon find relief. Financiers of a new Museum of Sex have just leased space in a building on Fifth Avenue at 27th Street, with plans for an official public opening early next year. Called Mosex for short, the museum will be devoted to the world's oldest human urge. Better yet for sex fans, this is big-think stuff -- Camille Paglia is a player! - so puritanical city administrators probably can't object. "What America needs is an institution that is smart and sexy," says Alison Maddex, who founded MoSex with Daniel Gluck, an investor. I want to elevate the status of sex, not keep it at the peep-show level. Thus, in addition to erotica exhibitions and performances, the museum will include a user-friendly Study and Archive Center and lectures. (More ribaldly, visitors will be able to eat 'aphrodisiac-oriented food at the restaurant.) This autumn's opening fund-raiser, "Food Fashion and Pheromones" will feature a Todd Oldham fashion show and samples of Realm, a synthesized human-pheromone perfume. There are also plans for "Pornotopia," a vintage X-rated film festival. Celebrities are lining up behind this thing. The Mosex guiding lights include Paglia (Maddex's romantic partner) and Arianna Huffington, the recently singlized commentator. But Maddex promises not to let matters get too elevated. "We want to reach a wide range of people, from a construction worker to a professor at Harvard," she says. "You won't have to drag your husband to it on a Sunday afternoon."