George Lucas has built a museum around an argument that the art world has spent much of the modern era resisting: images do not become lesser merely because people love them.
The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opened to the public in Los Angeles’s Exposition Park on September 22, after years of planning, relocation debates and construction. Founded by Lucas and Mellody Hobson, the institution presents itself as the first museum devoted to visual storytelling across cultures and centuries. Its collection brings together painting, illustration, comics, photography, film, murals and cinematic design.
The museum contains more than 40,000 works, with galleries organized around subjects including family, love, work, play, childhood and adventure. It occupies a 300,000-square-foot structure designed by Ma Yansong, surrounded by a 13-acre landscape designed by Mia Lehrer and Studio-MLA. The building includes roughly 100,000 square feet of gallery space, theaters, a research library and public gardens.
That is a large claim, and not merely because the building is large. The Lucas Museum is attempting to construct a new relationship between fine art, commercial illustration, comic books, children’s images, film production art and the visual mythology of popular entertainment.
Its language is democratic. The museum describes itself as a “museum of the people’s art,” a phrase that is generous, appealing and faintly dangerous.
“People’s art” can mean art made for broad audiences. It can also become a flattering name for the taste of one very wealthy person.
A museum as autobiography
The Lucas Museum’s collection reflects the history of its founder’s imagination. It includes comic art, illustration, cinematic artifacts, storyboards, science-fiction imagery and popular visual culture, along with works by artists such as Pablo Picasso, Frida Kahlo, Norman Rockwell, Charles White, Artemisia Gentileschi, Robert Colescott and Robert Crumb. More than 90 percent of the displayed material reportedly comes from Lucas’s personal collection.
This makes the museum both a public institution and an unusually elaborate autobiography.
Every museum is shaped by the preferences of collectors, trustees and curators. Few are so visibly associated with one person’s formative obsessions. Lucas has not merely donated a collection to an existing cultural structure. He has helped create a structure capable of explaining why those objects belong together.
That is the fascinating part. The museum is not asking only whether Star Wars objects belong in a museum. It is asking whether the visual culture that made Star Wars possible—comic-book composition, pulp illustration, heroic myth, adventure serials, concept art and the grammar of cinematic spectacle—has been wrongly separated from the history of art.
The answer is plainly yes, at least in part.
Popular imagery has always shaped how people imagine courage, romance, danger, family, the future and themselves. A child may encounter a Norman Rockwell illustration, a Peanuts drawing, a superhero comic or a science-fiction film before encountering anything an institution would traditionally classify as “serious” art. To dismiss those images as merely commercial is to misunderstand how culture actually enters people’s lives.
But cultural reach is not the same as artistic achievement. A familiar image may be powerful, ingenious or emotionally durable. It may also be sentimental, manipulative or simply bad.
The Lucas Museum will have to prove that it can distinguish between inclusion and indiscriminate admiration.
Recognition is only the beginning
The institution’s democratic promise is not trivial. Its galleries are organized around subjects such as family, community, childhood and play—categories that may feel more immediately accessible than the usual museum vocabulary of formalism, iconography and schools of influence.
This may be particularly effective for visitors who have never felt entirely welcome in museums.
The traditional museum often asks visitors to accept a distinction before they have been given an experience. It announces that one object belongs to art and another to entertainment, then explains the difference in language that can make the visitor feel as if the examination has already begun.
The Lucas Museum reverses that order. It starts with recognition. You know a comic panel, a movie poster, a children’s illustration or a familiar cinematic image before you know what the museum wants you to think about it.
There is a risk in this approach, naturally. Recognition is a powerful door, but it can also become a comfortable room from which visitors never leave. A museum should not merely reassure people that the images they already enjoy are worthy. It should make those images stranger, more complicated and more difficult to possess.
A museum devoted to narrative art ought to ask not only what stories images tell, but who gets to tell them, whose experiences are omitted, what kinds of bodies become heroic and what kinds of history are transformed into scenery.
The strongest material in such a museum may not be the object that confirms a visitor’s taste. It may be the object that unsettles the story the visitor thought they knew.
The problem with “the people”
The phrase “the people’s art” has a long and complicated history. It can be a genuine challenge to elitism, but it can also conceal a different kind of authority: the collector claiming to speak on behalf of everyone.
The museum’s founders clearly intend the phrase democratically. The institution emphasizes free public programming, a research library, public gardens and a campus designed as a civic gathering place rather than a sealed monument. Its grand opening included college students from across Los Angeles, and the surrounding campus is intended to function as public space as well as cultural infrastructure.
That matters in a city where cultural institutions often arrive as private visions wrapped in public language.
Yet no museum is democratic merely because it displays popular objects. Democracy depends on access, interpretation, staffing, programming and the willingness to let the public argue with the institution. A gallery of beloved images can still impose a narrow idea of who the public is.
The Lucas Museum’s collection appears strongest when it treats popular art as a serious historical record: evidence of what Americans feared, desired, purchased, watched, imagined and taught their children to recognize. It becomes weaker when the objects are treated as interchangeable examples of visual storytelling, as if a painting, a comic and a film prop become equal simply because all can be said to contain a narrative.
Narrative is not a value in itself. Propaganda has a narrative. Advertising has a narrative. A birthday card has a narrative. The interesting question is what a work does with its story—what it reveals, hides, complicates or makes newly visible.
Accessibility must not become ease
The Lucas Museum arrives at a moment when cultural institutions are increasingly expected to justify themselves by expanding their audiences. That pressure is understandable. Museums cannot survive as private chapels for people who already possess the vocabulary of admission.
But the answer cannot be to confuse accessibility with ease.
The museum’s opportunity is to show that popular visual culture is not a consolation prize for people who do not understand art. It is one of the principal places where modern people have learned to understand themselves.
Its danger is to become a monument to the taste of the collector who has already decided what the people like.
The distinction will emerge over time. It will be visible in the exhibitions that follow the opening, in the artists and scholars invited into the building, in the treatment of difficult histories and in the degree to which the museum permits its own categories to be challenged.
A museum can democratize culture by widening the field of attention. It can also domesticate culture by turning every disagreement into a pleasant tour.
The Lucas Museum has opened with the most appealing premise in the world of cultural institutions: that the images people carry with them deserve to be taken seriously.
Now it must demonstrate the harder proposition—that taking popular images seriously does not mean refusing to judge them.
Otherwise, the museum will not be a people’s art museum. It will be a very handsome scrapbook.
