George Lucas’ new billion-dollar L.A. museum “makes no apologies for looking like a spaceship,” said Philip Kennicott in The Washington Post. Built to house the Star Wars creator’s “vast and motley” personal collection of figurative art, the enormous white-clad structure brings centuries of efforts to democratize the museum experience to fruition in the form of “a gigantic, magnificent, messy, maddening absurdity.” To Lucas, good art is art that powerfully dramatizes the primal narrative of life, so his museum mixes Renaissance paintings with comics, manga, and science fiction illustration, while “Beatrix Potter rabbits and Maurice Sendak monsters rub shoulders with works by Andy Warhol and Frida Kahlo.” Because so many of the images and other cultural artifacts are famous, the museum “will be extraordinarily popular.” But don’t expect to find text that can help you sort through the work. “No museum I’ve ever visited is so committed to the anti-intellectual proposition that art is about feeling and experiencing, not thinking.
“Even if you hate art museums, consider this one,” said Rakesh Agrawal in PC Magazine. Rather than trying to educate visitors, it’s “just fun, with free-flowing galleries that encourage random exploration.” Not that you’re asked to shut off your brain. Among an array of charming Norman Rockwell paintings, the magazine illustrator’s famous 1958 image of a white boy chatting with a kindly cop at a diner counter hangs alongside a 2014 riff by Richard Williams that shows a Black boy recoiling from an officer in riot gear. “I spent two hours at the museum; I could easily have spent 10.” Though some visitors will be interested only in Star Wars paraphernalia, said Amy Nicholson in the Los Angeles Times, the franchise is largely limited to a single gallery focused on a single theme: vehicles. Among the highlights is a “fanged and ferocious” incarnation of General Grievous’ Revenge of the Sith wheel bike, which existed only in CGI until Lucas wanted to see one in person. Whatever gallery you wander into here, “you’re always aware of being inside his brain.”
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