by Anika Bukon
I first became aware of the much-discussed Lucas Museum actually getting serious about opening via art critics complaining about it. It was May 2025 and the museum had just cut 14 percent of its staff, mostly from the education teams. Now none of us want lay-offs, especially in this economy, but digging into the comments beneath the Facebook version of the article it was clear what the critics, curators and art historians’ real problem was: the museum had no use for them.
Depending who you ask, The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is dedicated to showing the public either a collection of art that tells a story or all the art the the creator of Star Wars liked and could afford. Both of these are good ideas. Professional snobs disagree—in the months before the museum’s opening, the Facebook pages of the art world’s middle management are awash in comments about the museum’s lack of rigor, dearth of curatorial interference, use of public money and “lack of clear mission”—as if the reason we like rich people letting us see art is we care about their mission.
ARTnews whines about the lack of didactic wall text:
Without [wall text], I left the Lucas without a clear sense of how the museum is positioning itself or, frankly, without learning much about anything beyond what I already knew: the works on view or their makers; Lucas and Hobson’s motivations as collectors; when works entered the collection; and why these works are worthy of further inquiry or study
…which raises the question of why someone who can look at an original Frank Frazetta or Norman Rockwell “without learning much about anything” is writing for an art magazine at all.
Artforum’s take is similarly, if more subtly, clueless:
…it presents the work of comic book artists John Romita Sr. and R. Crumb, illustrators Maxfield Parrish and Norman Rockwell, and fantasy painters Boris Vallejo and Frank Frazetta alongside masterworks by Artemisia Gentileschi, Lucas Cranach the Elder, and Pieter Brueghel the Younger, as well as Mary Cassatt, Frida Kahlo, and John Singer Sargent.
…note how the comics, illustrations and fantasy paintings are “works” while the canonical gallery artists’ production consists of “masterworks”.
Hyperallergic’s Matt Stromberg complains:
Works are largely presented without context as to how they originally functioned in the world. Was this painting reproduced on a fantasy magazine cover or in a children’s book, used on a protest sign, or intended to hang in a museum? It’s not clear. Frustratingly, works by Kerry James Marshall and Mel Ramos are included in the section on Comics and Graphic Stories, if for no other reason than that these works might evoke some of the visual elements of comics, but were never serially reproduced or intended as popular media.
…as if that wasn’t exactly the point. If the difference between openly-comic-book-inspired art world master-of-the-week Kerry James Marshall and the often poor, anonymous, and unrecognized comic book artists who inspired him isn’t immediately obvious, that isn’t the failure of the Lucas Museum, it’s the failure of Marshall and the critics that put him on a pedestal in the first place.
At the end of the day, the art-critical apparatus that these magazines and the caste who write for them represent was designed exactly to prevent the works the Lucas Museum elevates from ever appearing in a museum in the first place. The precious “context” that critics crave is not only largely available to anyone with a cell-phone, but is a field entirely shaped and shot-through with the dubious benefits of their connoisseurship.
Perhaps coming closest to hitting the nail on the head, Maximiliano Durón, author of the ARTnews piece, decries the narrative art museum’s lack of narrative using the following narrative:
I still distinctly recall learning in my high school AP Art History course what the composition of Jacques-Louis David’s The Coronation of Napoleon (1807) signaled, and how the placement of each figure from the French aristocracy conveyed their stature in Napoleon’s court. It’s what made me fall in love with art history.
What Durón and company seem to have missed is that the majority of art lovers started loving art when they first found themselves enjoying the experience of looking at it, not when they first had its least exciting aspects explained to them.
Imaqe: Courtesy Lucas Museum.
