If a picture is worth a thousand words, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles has decided it’s not worth writing a single one.
Nearly two decades in the making and costing more than $1 billion, the long-awaited Lucas Museum is finally ready to make its debut, with founding member previews starting next week and its public opening on September 22. The two scrapped plans in different cities (first Chicago, then San Francisco) and the eight years spent building it in LA have certainly added to the hype surrounding the country’s newest museum.
In a promotional video for the museum, cofounder George Lucas says he has always had a problem with the mainstream art world’s rigid delineations between what is and isn’t art. It’s a noble cause, and one that many would now agree with. The past decade has seen profound changes in the art world, with scholars, curators, and critics working to rewrite an art historical canon that has, since the formalization of art history as a discipline in 18th-century Europe, been predicated on hierarchies of artistic media and artists and a neat succession of one movement giving way to another. In the process, innumerable artists and countless approaches have been pushed to the margins, including some of the work on view at the Lucas, particularly illustration.
