COPENHAGEN (AFP) — A sex museum has closed shop in the Danish capital for lack of funds from city authorities and fewer visitors, officials said Wednesday.

“The museum asked for subsidies which we refused to give,” a city hall spokesman Erik Bjoern Moeller told AFP of the 15-year-old Museum Erotica Copenhagen, which traces humans’ sexual life over the centuries.

He said the establishment did not house “the jewels of Danish culture” to merit such aid and stressed it was run like a business establishment.

But officials from the museum, which has been declared bankrupt, argue otherwise.

“It’s strange that nobody thinks it is necessary to have an erotic museum in a country of so-called free thinkers like Denmark,” which liberalised pornography in 1969, museum director Hanne Steensgaard said, in remarks carried on the website of the daily Jyllands-Posten.

“This museum is not a porno shop, but an establishment that offers a true accounting of sexuality among human beings from 1,000 BC until the present day.”

Located in central Copenhagen, the museum offered a hodgepodge of photos, drawings, movies, sculptures and other erotic objects including a portrayal of deceased American sex goddess Marilyn Monroe.

Roughly a million visitors, half of them women, had passed through its doors since they opened in 1994, the museum said on its website.