When Egypt's famous boy king arrives in South Florida on Dec. 15, he will be bearing candy, and it will be on sale at your friendly local shopping mall.

See's has opened an additional kiosk for the sale and promotion of the Tut chocolates in Fort Lauderdale's Galleria Mall, where the museum's resident gift shop is already all Tut all the time. Papa John's Pizza, Publix supermarkets, McDonald's and even Holland America Cruise Lines are also aboard the Tut train.

Ninety South Florida Starbucks shops are carrying King Tut exhibit posters. Sixty thousand Starbucks e-mail subscribers have been receiving ''e-blasts'' as the Tut exhibit's arrival draws near.

Call them odd couplings, but as information becomes more easily and cheaply accessible through the Internet and related technology, museums and other cultural and historical organizations are having to use ultra-modern strategies to overcome short attention spans for old products.

Several decades ago, museums regularly operated in the red and banked on the pure historical and cultural value of an exhibit to draw the crowds, Mandeville said.

According to Richard Van Doren, See's vice president for marketing, while the King Tut exhibit was at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art recently, they ''sold a hell of a lot'' of the $16.60 truffle boxes, and the Fort Lauderdale museum stands to take 70 percent of the profits from the candy sales.

''For the museums, I think our putting this image on a box of candy that will be seen by lots of people in public areas helps raise the notoriety of the exhibit,'' Van Doren said.

And notoriety, Van Doren said, is just what older cultural institutions like museums need if they are going to compete with modern entertainment outlets.

Ken Carbone, founding partner of the Carbone Smolan Agency and a recognized museum marketing expert, agreed that museums and corporate America can make profitable partners, but that profit is not always good for the art.

Carbone said he has seen a number of museums make money from selling such things as scarves featuring the image of a work on display, or pasta noodles crafted in the shape of ballerinas to promote an Edgar Degas exhibit.

Still, if it's any testament to the power of such marketing, Carbone said that in spite of his misgivings, even he is not immune to purchasing the occasional art-related trifle, like a postcard, from a museum gift shop.

While some museum fundraisers might want him to ''lighten up and get a life,'' Carbone insisted that he understands their struggle to balance the cultural value of art with the need for money to show it properly.

Peter Koeppel, whose Koeppel Direct has helped old-school corporations and nonprofits step up their technological games, believes that museums can maintain dignity while taking advantage of new-school tools.

Koeppel, who lauded the Fort Lauderdale museum's partnership with See's Candies as innovative, said cultural organizations might consider using TV infomercials, e-mail and Internet blogs as promotional tools, as well.

''Smart organizations now have experts discuss products -- or in this case exhibits -- in blogs, where people can read and interact with the writer, and it encourages curiosity,'' Koeppel said.

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