Versace, vomit, and bare cheek at the museum

We've had Liz Hurley's safety-pin dress, James Bond's gadgets, "vomit machines" and even Wonderbra posters.

Now, museum goers are to be given the chance to fondle breast and penis implants and chat to liposuction experts in the latest attempt by curators to "connect" with the modern British public.

Critics fear that the one-day show, to be held at the Science Museum next Saturday, will be another example of the "dumbing down" of once venerated institutions.

The event, "The Science of Beauty", is the latest in a series of 29 "experimental" mini exhibitions at the museum in South Kensington, London. Others in the series, dubbed "Naked Science", have included a session on the paranormal in which visitors were invited to join in a seance. Future events will include a show about physical abnormality with routines by poets and standup comics from the Comedy Store. Also planned is an exploration of the concept of the Victorian freak show with the help of puppeteers, and Marisa Carnesky – whose stage name is The Jewess Tattooess and who performs wearing little more than her colourful body designs.

News of the shows comes six months after the museum provoked a mix of disgust and consternation by venturing into the science of the fart and the burp in its exhibition "Grossology: The (Impolite) Science of the Human Body".

Dr Deborah Scopes, events manager for the Metamorphing Gallery, where the shows are being staged, says they are intended to help curators to "engage in a dialogue" with the public. "We want people to realise that they don't need a PhD in particle physics to understand our exhibitions," she said. "We want them to be citizen scientists. I don't see that what we're doing is any different in spirit to what we've always done – it's just the format that's changed."

Asked about next weekend's event, Dr Scopes added enthusiastically: "With the penile, testicular and breast implants, we are just going to let people touch them and feel them. It's a handling session. "You watch all these programmes on TV about sex and cosmetic surgery. There are breasts everywhere but, women as well as men, we all want to feel them, don't we?"

Not everyone is so minded. Stephen Bayley, the former director of the Design Museum, said he did not want to condemn the show without seeing it first, but he hoped curators had not "suspended their artistic judgement". He said: "It's important for museums to explore modern industry and issues, but curators need to realise that you can make excellent things popular, but that you can't always make popular things excellent." Mr Bayley cited the newly opened retrospective of the late fashion designer Gianni Versace at the Victoria and Albert Museum as an example of how not to present modern material culture in exhibitions.

Dismissing that exhibition as "merely an advert" and "a missed opportunity", Mr Bayley, who curated the V&A's celebrated Boilerhouse displays, said: "Versace does not deserve to be in the V&A on the grounds of quality, although it would fit in the form of a critique of the history of the PR industry, particularly in terms of the dress that Liz Hurley wore to the premiere of Four Weddings and a Funeral.

"The problem is that they don't do this. Versace's designs are presented for our uncritical adoration."

Giles Waterfield, a former director of the Dulwich Picture Gallery whose novel, The Hound in the Left-Hand Corner, satirises a gallery exhibition on "The Nowness of Now", said museums should not be afraid to be populist. However, he said they must guard against becoming mere "receiving houses" and "advertising tools" for the products of multinational companies.

Among the "superficial" exhibitions Mr Waterfield singled out for his criticism were the British Museum's recent show entitled "Agatha Christie's Egypt" and a National Portrait Gallery retrospective of the work of the celebrity photographer Mario Testino.

Commenting on the Science Museum's latest show, he added: "A bit of theme park is fine, so long as it's not all theme park."

Claire Wilcox, the curator of the V&A's Versace exhibition, said: "Versace is a very interesting designer, who really sexualised male fashion. Rather than getting into all the celebrity associated with Versace, we felt our show was an opportunity to ask the question, 'how many people have actually looked at the clothes themselves?'"