George Lucas knew he needed a hook — the requisite fan service — at his new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in downtown Los Angeles. That’s why there’s a large main gallery full of Star Wars crown-jewel production pieces, from R2-D2 and Darth Vader’s suit to podracers galore. The collection of his own artifacts is at once ego monument as well as a reminder that this billion-dollar institution wouldn’t be possible without the culture-defining, fortune-making commercial success he achieved in Hollywood.
It also makes perfect sense under the intellectual and idiosyncratic terms of this oddball personal endeavor, a final-act provocation which only someone with fuck-you money can realize at such colossal scale and scope. A museum as Megalopolis. The approach taken by Lucas, 82, is a striking throwback to the rich, eccentric autodidact’s cabinet-of-curiosities concept associated with Gilded Age figures like Henry Clay Frick, Henry Huntington and P.T. Barnum. But it’s also a distinct expression of Lucas’ own artistic influences and impacts.
R2-D2 and a C-3PO costumes are displayed in the “Star Wars in Motion” exhibit at the new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art during a media preview of the 300,000-square-foot structure on Sept. 2, in Los Angeles.
