"Both his father, a glass blower at the Corning Glass Works, and his wife's grandfather, a Norwegian glass blower, may have had something to do with William Warmus's interest in contemporary glass.

But, said the 36-year-old freelance writer and curator, it was only when he was well on his way to becoming an Egyptologist and then veering toward modern art and philosophy that he really became interested in glass.

''As a child I did have the best chemistry set around, but it was not until 1978 that I got involved with glass in earnest,'' Mr. Warmus said. That year he became a curator of contemporary glass at the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, N.Y.

That also coincided with what he described as ''the flowering of studio glass.''

The last decade, he says, has produced a growing interest in glass among both craftspeople and collectors. Mr. Warmus's approach is unusual. ''I'm not interested in history,'' he explained, ''but in ferreting out the masterpieces that tell history.''

Mr. Warmus, who lives in Lansing, N.Y., said: ''I feel that at this point glass should be respected as a work of craft and not art. The ultimate determination about what is craft and what is art will be made by history.''

For the last few months he has been organizing an exhibition of Italian glass titled ''The Venetians: Modern Glass 1919-1990'' for the Muriel Karasik Gallery, 1094 Madison Avenue, at 82d Street, in Manhattan. The exhibition, which opened Friday, continues to Dec. 2.

''Glass,'' Mr. Warmus said, ''is full of contradictions, has none of the preservation problems of paintings and will last forever, unless you break it.''"