The Miami Herald - 12/22/08 - Television Review

You want eclectic? Micky Wolfson gives you eclectic

• Souvenirs: The Many Worlds of Micky Wolfson, 8-9 p.m. Monday. WLRN-PBS 17

BY GLENN GARVIN

The quintessential moment in Souvenirs: The Many Worlds of Micky Wolfson comes early, as cameras follow Miami's mad museum benefactor on a shopping expedition. First possible acquisition: Queen Victoria's toilet. Next up: a wooden box bristling with small electrical wires, a piece of quack medical technology from the 19th century. Finally: a social-realist painting of a farmworker, muscles bulging heroically, the kind of thing that illustrated propaganda pamphlets of both the New Deal and Stalin's grandiose five-year agricultural plans. No discernible political, aesthetic or even chronological thread connects these three objects -- they barely seem to come from the same planet -- but Wolfson is delighted. ''This is so Wolfsonian,'' he murmurs. "That's us.''

It's precisely this eclecticism and disregard for the stuffy rules of museum curation that make Miami Beach's Wolfsonian-FIU such a fascinating place and Souvenirs such a fascinating documentary. Armed with an enormous fortune and an abiding conviction that anything that interests him will interest the rest of us, Wolfson has created a museum that is among the most respected and definitely the most eccentric in the world. Souvenirs is the first attempt to get beneath its surface.

Or sectors of the surface, anyway. Made in part with Wolfson family contributions, Souvenirs is not a work of investigative journalism. If you're interested in the machinations that led the state of Florida to take over the Wolfsonian when it nearly bankrupted its owner even before the doors opened, this is not the place to look.

Filmmakers Vera Graaf and Max Scott concentrate instead on what makes Wolfson tick in such an unsyncopated way. Inheriting $85 million from his father, who founded South Florida's biggest movie-theater chain and its first television station, and without the slightest interest in business himself (''he was always the black sheep of the family,'' observes one friend,) Wolfson used his money to indulge a passion for collecting souvenirs of his travels around the world. Though, he concedes, ``I guess my souvenirs are more expensive than postage stamps or postcards.''

No kidding. At one point, friends estimate, he was spending $10 million a year on everything from abandoned subway turnstiles to antique cocktail shakers. His own father, he admits, regarded Wolfson's collection as ``at best, glorious junk; at worst, just junk.''
He quickly filled up his home -- friends interviewed in Souvenirs recall he had four bathrooms, all rendered unusable by the enormous stacks of books stored therein -- and started buying warehouses. Some of the shots of the warehouses recall the final scene of Citizen Kane, when the camera pulls back on a vast sea of crates, the legacy of a millionaire who thought he could own everything.

But Wolfson is no Charles Foster Kane, hoarding his possessions in private. He turned his collections into museums -- the Wolfsonian and its sister institution, the Wolfsoniana in Genoa, Italy. In fact, Wolfson doesn't even like to be called a collector; he prefers preservationist. ''A collector wants something,'' he notes. ``I didn't want anything.''

The museums wouldn't work if Wolfson's interests were really as formlessly random as they can appear at first glance. As Souvenirs notes, his collections are built -- however haphazardly at times -- around recurring themes, particularly the collision of nature with modernity. That's why they don't follow the traditional museum lines of individual artists or even artistic movements. ''It's not art for art's sake,'' Wolfson explains. ``They're objects in function of ideas for the information age.''

Another fascination is the relationship of totalitarianism and propaganda, born during childhood trips with his father to the ruins of postwar Germany. What, he wondered, turned Germans -- ''the most educated and cultured people in Europe'' -- into a murderous mob of raving anti-Semites?

If Souvenirs has impressive intellectual heft, it can also be just good fun. (Sometimes unintentionally; one of its most entertaining sidelights is watching Wolfson's weight and hair length Ping-Pong up and down over the six years it took to shoot the documentary.)
It is not often you get to see a multimillionaire haggling over prices like a flea-market dealer, much less losing. Told what a merchant is asking for a collection of pictures, Wolfson wants to know the real price -- ''for us, as a new client.'' Replies the merchant in astonishment: "New clients? New clients? They're the ones who pay the most."