It is quite fitting that Los Angeles’ new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art looks like a spaceship since it is the “colossal pet project” of the man behind the Star Wars franchise, George Lucas, said The Washington Post. Thought to cost an “eye-popping” $1 billion (£756 million), the art inside is a “dizzying mix” of Renaissance and baroque paintings, digital reproductions, a Naboo N-1 Starfighter and “great heaps of the finest dreck”.
At the museum’s official opening, Lucas’ co-founder and wife, Mellody Hobson, said the collection’s broad scope was intentional, as narrative art should be anything that “depicts the myths that anchor us, the stories that we believe in”. But, for many in the art world, such a statement subverts the traditional principles of art, and signals a worrying trend towards more superficial art curation.
‘Cinematic, commercial, kitsch’
“Lucas has built a temple to story,” said The Atlantic. The exhibits may sound “random” but that makes this collection “wildly democratic” and, like Star Wars, a “brilliant hodgepodge of influences”. Any “conceptual bagginess” in this “all-gatheringness” is a statement in itself: art is a “vehicle for the real story, which is imagination and connection, which is life”.
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Unlike traditional art museums, Lucas’ displays are “heavy on character-building, storytelling and myth-making”, and are “largely untouched by abstraction and other innovations of modern art”, said The Art Newspaper. Beyond the expected Star Wars ephemera, there are a few nice surprises: works by street artists Banksy and JR, and a “first-rate selection” of children’s book illustrations. Granted, the mix is “profoundly weird” but, rather than trying to “fetishise” original objects, it speaks to a desire to view “every image as ripe for reproduction”.
“There is something so cinematic, commercial and kitsch” about it, it is definitely in the right city – “home of the Hollywood hills and tills”, said The Economist. There is a “certain scorning of traditional expertise”: very few exhibits display accompanying text to explain what they are and why they’re there. “Snooty critics may sneer” but Lucas wants people “looking at the image and not the history lesson”.
‘Anti-intellectual’
“To which group of people do these narrative artworks belong?” said Art Review. The Western Stories gallery, for example, consists of entirely “Wild West” imagery “from a genre that has enabled an insidious historical revision of the forced displacement of Indigenous people”. And the Work sections shows largely “white men engaged in the dignified labour of industrialisation”. Throughout, “gendered stereotypes and sexist visual conventions abound”; narratives are “shown from only one side – that of a dominant American ideology reflected in the country’s most commercialised artforms”.
Lucas has “brought the history of the Western art museum to its inevitable conclusion”, said The Washington Post. “Centuries of efforts to democratise the experience have come to fruition, in a gigantic, magnificent, messy, maddening absurdity.”
Disconnecting art from its history in this way “sidelines the moral, ethical and cultural content of the story”. It’s as though the museum is dedicated to “the anti-intellectual proposition that art is feeling and experiencing, not thinking”, by getting rid of “all the old hierarchies, categories and distinctions” and replacing them with “anything that feels cinematic”. It’s a “bewildering” but also “astonishing pantheon of disparate but recognisable images”. It will be “extraordinarily popular”.
