George Lucas's Art Museum: His Best Idea Since Star Wars

 

An art museum is supposed to spark discussion about the artists whose works are collected inside—not about the person whose name is on the building.

 

But the recently announced Lucas Museum for Narrative Art, director George Lucas’s testament to the power of visual narrative, will likely do both when it opens in Chicago in 2018. That’s because unlike a lot of museums—including its lakefront neighbors the Field Museum, the Shedd Aquarium, and the Adler Planetarium—the guy who gives the museum its name will also give it start-up money and a number of his own projects for immediate display. It’s a radical move. Hollywood directors, producers, and actors regularly dabble in all aspects of the movie business, but in the art scene, curators and philanthropists take care to stick to their prescribed roles.

 

Not everyone’s excited to see a blockbuster director ignore the museum world’s traditional divide between art and commerce. History has seen very few high-profile hybrid creator/curators. There were exceptions, of course, but whenAuguste Rodin established his Musée in 1919, he boasted serious art-world credentials. Criticizing Lucas, Deanna Isaacs argued in the Chicago Reader that 20th-century merchandising magnates Marshall Field, John G. Shedd, and Max Adler promoted a higher standard of museum by resisting the urge to, say, exhibit Sears-Roebeck catalogs and Frango mints. “Discreet, anonymous philanthropy is a distant memory of a less crass era,” she lamented. Other have called the Lucas Museum a “vanity project,” the same title offered to explain the director’s poorly reviewed Star Wars prequels and animated series.

 

In truth, though, the museum may be Lucas’s best original idea since A New Hope. Lucas proposes an institution that—like his culture-hopping, historically inspired films—connects the visual storytelling techniques of antiquity (cave art, illustrations) to the those of the modern day (animation, digital art), for a time-bending, medium-defying, cross-platform experience. If the premise appears self-serving, it is also the logical culmination of a few art-world trends old and new.

 

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