Lucas Museum Opens $1 Billion Los Angeles Showcase, Challenging Art World Hierarchies
Updated
Updated · The Washington Post · Sep 21
Lucas Museum Opens $1 Billion Los Angeles Showcase, Challenging Art World Hierarchies
3 articles · Updated · The Washington Post · Sep 21
Summary
$1 billion and more than 300,000 square feet have gone into George Lucas’s Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which opens Tuesday in Los Angeles with about 1,300 works on view.
Lucas says the museum honors “humanity’s stories” by elevating illustration and representational art, from comics and manga to Rockwell, Kahlo, Dorothea Lange and Star Wars material.
Minimal wall labels and a stated refusal to make the museum “a history lesson” define its approach, prioritizing immediate visual experience over historical, political and cultural context.
That philosophy, the review argues, blurs boundaries between fine art and popular imagery while leaving misogynistic, patriarchal or propagandistic content insufficiently examined.
After roughly two decades of development, the museum is expected to be highly popular, even as its celebrity-driven, image-heavy model poses a broader challenge to more traditional museums.