The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art has opened in Los Angeles, long-awaited, expansive, and with a surprise Banksy that nobody leaked. It is a museum built around the idea that visual storytelling is a legitimate art form deserving of institutional space. It is also a museum built by one of the most powerful narrative architects alive. That tension is the most interesting thing about it.
Who Gets to Define What Narrative Art Is
Lucas's instinct, that illustration, film, comics, and popular imagery deserve the same institutional legitimacy as oil painting, is correct and overdue. But the institution that defines a category also shapes what fits inside it. The conversation The Met's Max Hollein has been having about museums in the digital age keeps circling the same question: who decides what is worth preserving, and whose aesthetic framework does the preserving? A museum funded by and named for a single filmmaker is a different kind of answer than a public institution with a collecting mandate. Both are valid. Only one of them is honest about the subjectivity baked in.
The Banksy Problem and the Christie's Coincidence
The surprise Banksy is either irony or very good curation: an artist whose entire practice is about the illegitimacy of institutional power, now hanging in a private institution. Meanwhile, Christie's and Bonhams just raised their buyer's fees, the market tightening its own grip on who can participate in art's legitimation economy. ICE seized 22,000 antiquities in Florida this week, a reminder that the question of who owns cultural objects is never settled and never clean. The Lucas Museum is gorgeous and ambitious. It is also, unavoidably, an argument made in stone and steel about who gets to say what stories matter.