What happens to us after we die is a fundamental question of human civilization, and anxieties about succession lurk beneath every human story: Will my work live on? Will my children pass on good values? Have I done my duty? Our rituals, religions, sacred sites, and art all seek to answer these big questions, yet none can conclusively, or we wouldn’t keep asking.
I could feel these existential questions in the air as I walked past huge models of Star Wars spaceships alongside a Frida Kahlo self-portrait in the galleries of Los Angeles’ new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art — a tribute to human storytelling through visual art that filmmaker George Lucas and his wife, Mellody Hobson, a Chicago-born investor and civic leader, worked on for nearly 17 years. After a lifetime of creating and collecting exceptionally popular narrative art, what happens to these ideas and objects when their 82-year-old creator and cataloguer, George Lucas, is gone? And what happens to his reputation, his legacy — himself?
I left the museum thinking that Lucas attempts to resolve the mystery of life after death in two ways. First, by guiding us through the history of visual storytelling itself and seeing how others dealt with creativity and mortality. Second, by installing his own work among high-brow canonical artists like Van Gogh, Artemisia Gentileschi, Alphonse Mucha, and Frida Kahlo. By the time we’re done with the approximately five-hour tour of the museum, we are tempted to accept Lucas’s methods and his place among the greats.
Everything about this new cultural institution comes in opposing pairs.
During the trippy experience of browsing this five-story museum, which houses some 100,000 square feet of gallery space, Lucas and Hobson manage to conjure an interesting co-exhibition of pop and high culture in a way that does not blur the lines between the two, but instead insists that exceptional talent and greatness exist at every level, and that each category’s leaders deserve recognition. Through curation and design, the co-founders seem to be declaring that the public, voting with its dollars, knows best. I was wondering how they did it.
The car stops at the humbly named One Lucas Plaza. The campus is crowded, the excitement palpable. Glancing into the main lobby, you see it packed with families, the parents as keen as their kids. Upon entry, you are presented with two directions. Choosing the main lobby side on the right, you will not be done making decisions for the day. But despite always being made to choose a direction, going inside the construct that is this museum, you will be engaging with a space that has its own intentions, its own decisions, not just art. Built as a sequence of half-opening side galleries, the circular upper level seems to have been designed to make you miss things each round and need to go back and look again. I asked a museum guard where to start. “Anywhere,” he said. “It’s all a big race course.”
When people first study playwriting and screenwriting, they tend to start with Aristotle. But modern dramaturgy — the art of dramatic storytelling — was founded by a later Aristotle disciple during the German Enlightenment, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. In Laocoön (1766), Lessing sharpened the differentiation between visual and verbal art forms: visual art presents its content to the viewer all at once, with its details arranged in space, while texts such as poems unfold over time. His famous example was the mythological “Shield of Achilles.” In a painting, we receive all the shield’s details simultaneously, our eyes roaming from detail to detail. In a narrative text, this simultaneity is missing: When the same shield pops up in Homer’s Iliad, the poet doesn’t describe the finished object. Verbally, the shield can only come to life as a story, being forged by the god of blacksmiths, Hephaestus. The poet controls how we discover and imagine the shield in time. To Lessing, this fundamental difference in time, power, and agency between the two art forms raised interesting questions about theater (as this was before film): What happens when the visual and the verbal coexist in a work of art?
If it took this much time and failure for a duo as powerful as Lucas and Hobson to build their museum, we should change how new cultural institutions get built in America.
The curators of the Lucas Museum are fascinated with the same question but tackle it from the opposite end. How do static images — paintings, comics, statues — convey a narrative? From Moebius to Tintin to Walt Disney, through Norman Rockwell and Star Wars and Banksy, we’re asked to examine how dynamic stories are told, captured, or immortalized through what doesn’t move in front of us. Artists like George Lucas seem compelled to tell stories. In his museum, he gets to investigate his own obsession from a position of control, dictating the timeline of our discovery and how we encounter his story of stories.
To pull this off, the Lucas Museum presents a risky but mostly successful combination of seemingly incompatible things. In fact, everything about this new cultural institution comes in opposing pairs. What comes across as great cultural abundance — the massive museum space, the countless artworks, the library, cinema, roof garden, sculpture garden, event spaces — can all be mapped out in pairs of contrasts.
Take, for instance, the building’s shape: a two-node structure informing the audience even before entry that this quest will be all about balance. The elongated “North” side houses the main lobby, the auditoriums, and the inaugural exhibition dedicated to the history of narrative art. The round “Education” side, which opens to the public gardens, houses the library (with a great view of the gardens). The galleries run above the two wings, across, all around.
The most crucial pair of opposites around which the Lucas Museum organizes itself is emphasized to you even before you spot the two-directionality of the building or could head upstairs. You intuit right away that pop culture and highbrow will blend here in surprising and potentially fun ways because, as you pass the glass-walled library wing on your way to the entrances, the first thing you glimpse is a life-size replica of a Naboo N-1 Starfighter!
Once you have recovered from this remarkable sight, you will vow to come back to the library after seeing the exhibition, and move into the main lobby on the opposite side. There, you will take a fast glass elevator upstairs, which makes some of the people inside it scream a little. And, having safely reached the gallery level, you will be thrust right into the middle of a world of fantasy and romance…
That pop is the culture the exhibition starts with would have startled me somewhat had I not recently been to other LA museums, like the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. Still, accepting the unusual contrast of comics and classical art side by side does take a minute; this is not something we are visually accustomed to. Traditional museums train us to expect famous old paintings hanging from the walls. Here, images familiar from the walls of a comic book store stare back at us. Dragons and maidens, knights with swords, making a case for the contemporary human imagination. As you hop from genre to genre, from topic to topic, deeper into the museum, you eventually face Norman Rockwell classics while characters and vehicles from the Star Wars movies glare back at you through a glass partition.
I am sure there are art purists who will be baffled or scandalized by this arrangement. Having grown up in show business and then studied high art, this deliberate organizing duality ended up feeling familiar and comforting to me. I marvelled at how, in this giant futuristic building shaped like a spaceship and reminiscent of the Star Wars planet Kamino, in this foreign West Coast city I was merely visiting, I was still made to feel at home. Pop culture, like high art, unites us all. It is everyone’s — something America’s creative industry is very good at making you feel.
Combining familiar and new seems to be another one of this museum’s conceits. It might be a trend, too. A couple of months ago I saw the new Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), whose Geffen Galleries have been criticized as feeling like a “dump” — supposedly no chronology, no clear logic beyond association, like a display of a private art collection meant to remain private. I disagreed. On the sensual level, LACMA is a generous and pleasurable experience – cozy and thought-provoking. On the professional level, of course not all great museums have to be chronological collections like the National Gallery, the Uffizi Gallery, or the Met. There is no such real rule. If you visit, for example, the Borghese in Rome, you will see that they have not done the narrative work for you at all — you as the viewer are trusted enough to make your way around, in your own way, and draw your own conclusions. Most importantly, on the geographical level, we must ask why a city as new, unique, and known for its groundbreaking creativity as Los Angeles should even emulate old, chronological European institutions in how it approaches, arranges, and presents its culture. LA is allowed to do things its own way.
With that in mind, I found the innovative display logic that the Lucas Museum aspires to not only permissible but kind of expected. In many people’s eyes, George Lucas single-handedly reinvented science fiction, founded the modern field of special effects, and created the Hollywood franchise. He might have reinvented Hollywood. If the ghosts of old museums haunted him as he curated his museum, the new way clearly won. Los Angeles doesn’t need Europe-copying museums the way traditional institutions in Philadelphia, DC, Boston, or San Francisco’s Legion of Honor might suggest. And one of the greatest innovators of the movie business — of 20th-century art — certainly was right not to build one.
Such dualities, this two-wingedness, organize everything here. As we move toward the belly of the “spaceship,” selfie-takers swarm the wide landscape windows, trying to squeeze the museum’s interior and exterior into their camera frames. Low to high, the social classes of the visitors get a nod: from a friendly-priced canteen to a fancy restaurant, from a public park — where, a staff member was telling me, couples now get their wedding photos taken — to the exclusive, VIP-only roof garden, our steps around the museum are also guided by how much we are willing to spend.
The building itself becomes the narrative, pulling you to its final act.
Whether the many contrasting experiences the Lucas Museum encompasses were the result of a compromise between the married couple who co-founded it would be interesting to find out. Alongside the comics, science fiction, manga, and dragon-flame fantasy, we are also led through sections dedicated to the simplest, most humane experiences. The delta of realism is as wide as storytelling allows. However universal the feelings of Norman Rockwell’s little girl, sitting at the top of the stairs while her parents host a Christmas party in the living room, she should “officially” be an artistic world away from “Oh no, Darth Vader is my dad!” But this museum embraces that breadth.
It might be my conjecture, but it makes sense for co-founding spouses to dedicate so much real estate to the intimate, everyday themes of Love, Motherhood, Family, Community, Sports. We detect Hobson’s beneficial leadership in the spaces devoted to American democracy and civic commitment. The evolution of America’s self-concept is given a striking visual history. From Leyendecker’s old-money playboys to a replica of Diego Rivera’s mural that shocked the Rockefellers, from Norman Rockwell’s moving canon celebrating the daily life of American families to Kadir Nelson’s monumental depictions of Black past and present, I saw many museum visitors who might have come for Star Wars now standing deep in thought in front of an unexpected painting. Talk about a thing that unites us all: Upon entering, moving through rooms of fantasy and romance, few might expect to be driven to meditate on the future of American self-governance, our cities and homes — even though that, if anything, is our most important story.
The thing is, we are in a new institution dedicated to “narrative art.” And narrative doesn’t just mean storytelling — it is also the stories we tell ourselves. During my five hours roaming the museum, the most important duality I found was that of depiction and self-reference — how we’re shown galaxies far, far away from us next to familiar forms that constitute our lives. Art that is for everybody must also be about everybody. The Lucas Museum seeks to both create awareness of what our narrative is and can be, and tell its own story in no uncertain terms.
The collection’s line between “mine” and “not mine” works in some sections better than in others. The architecture section, for instance, felt superfluous and random to me — was this altar to the architecture firm MAD, which designed the museum, really needed? In such a case, I think, the section should have been called “MAD,” and not “architecture.” It’s a room clearly created just so Lucas and Hobson can exhibit earlier design concepts of the museum, which they’d failed to get built in San Francisco and Chicago. Don’t get me wrong, I was absolutely interested in the failed designs — a cautionary tale about American bureaucracy, at least — but the honest way to show them would have been by owning up to what really was being shown.
When it comes to the museum’s main attraction — the Star Wars items — our misgivings about self-reference disappear as expected. We are totally here to see what is George Lucas’s, and there is no queasiness over whether his stuff should be displayed prominently among other sci-fi universes. His is the sci-fi universe, after all, not just a deserving member but one of the genre’s leaders.
The entire exhibition floor — despite all the sections and masters — is clearly designed around the Star Wars rooms, which, unlike any other area, are visible through the glass from sections away. You know early on that it’s coming; it is the destination we’re all moving toward eagerly, together. Here Lessing’s two artistic time zones converge: We may have been roaming the galleries freely, managing our own direction and pace, but now the storyteller takes over and decides where we must go next — and when. The building itself becomes the narrative, pulling you to its final act. If Lucas is anxious about whether you will notice his masterpiece, he should relax: Princess Leia has been watching you since the children’s art section.
After some confusion, we locate the special entrance into the Star Wars corridor. To my surprise, nobody takes selfies with C-3PO and R2-D2 until I do, and then a line starts forming. By the time I reach the XJ-6 Airspeeder and the Koro-2 Exodrive Airspeeder, that corner is full of people clamoring for photographs — I feel slightly guilty as I work my way through the well-known characters from the classic movies and the newer, more controversial ones, but not for long. The original props and costumes are mesmerizing, as is all the artwork that first conceptualized the famous locations, visuals, and objects of Lucas’s fictional world. The privilege I felt to be “backstage” like this reminded me of when I visited the Harry Potter Studios in England, being so close to the set and props, the talent and craft that went into them to entertain us all.
The costumes of "Batman" or the Lion from "The Wizard of Oz" get so much floor space because We the People love them — because they are important to our self-understanding.
Out in the sculpture garden, Leia will be tugging at her chains to free herself from Jabba the Hutt, but in here she — like her brother, father and comrades — stands nobly, as if out of Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the comparative mythology book that inspired Lucas and helped him write a saga relatable to everyone. Here, in his new museum, amassing his life’s work and collections, he is once again engaging in comparative mythology and once again settles on the monomyth: Whether Westeros or a Western, in the end it’s supposed to be about the friends we made along the way. In every human story, there exists an imprint of our evolution, our strength, our testimony, and our ability to be useful to our community.
The founders of the Lucas Museum wanted a shrine to “people’s art” — including their own. All in all, I think they’ve succeeded. It is harrowing to consider that it took them 17 years — eight years just building the L.A. site. If it took this much time and failure for a duo as powerful, wealthy, popular, and well-connected as Lucas and Hobson, we should change how new cultural institutions get built in America. Despite these difficulties, the Lucas Museum is intent on celebrating America and its culture, from the most mundane to the most elite. Its collection doesn’t rank artworks by the old hierarchies but by what it expects to resonate with the audience. Lucas can thank the crowds for turning him into one of the most important filmmakers alive: In America and around the world, people keep watching and loving his movies. If anyone should trust the audience to be able to vote with their feet and their wallets, it’s him. And he seems to have learned that lesson well, and is willing to teach it. In his museum, Banksy, Frida Kahlo, Norman Rockwell, and Luke Skywalker — the costumes of Batman or the Lion from The Wizard of Oz — get so much floor space because We the People love them, because they are important to our self-understanding.
With the new LACMA and the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, America’s second biggest city has become an undeniable “museum city,” and the most important one on the West Coast. Even though Hollywood still worries about the shrinking of the entertainment industry, people seem to be back in cinemas across America. If the Lucas Museum succeeds, a new wave of tourism will also appear in Los Angeles: families and friends coming just to see it.
Unlike LACMA, the Lucas Museum has no churchlike vibes — nothing mystical here except human talent and resourcefulness. This white, light-filled building treats creativity as a pragmatic matter to build, civic life as a self-evident duty for all, culture as something we all share and should participate in. This is the level of agency a film titan and a financial titan expect from us, mere mortals. If this is George Lucas’s life wisdom and the message he seeks to leave behind for posterity, it is a constructive one. His is a very practical pharaoh’s pyramid with many useful treasures — some his own, some that he wants to be remembered among. My strongest feeling upon leaving the campus was that I must now immediately rewatch the original Star Wars movies. Could that mean he won?
This article George Lucas spent 17 years building his latest world. This one you can walk through. is featured on Big Think.