George Lucas is opening the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, and the Star Wars founder sounds ready for a fight with the art crowd.
The museum, co-founded by Lucas and his wife Mellody Hobson, opens September 22, 2026, in Los Angeles’ Exposition Park. It has been years in the making and is built around what Lucas calls narrative art, meaning art that tells a story.
For Lucas, the mission is personal.
“Illustrators and they never get credit for anything” says Lucas
Speaking with Vulture, Lucas said the idea came from having years of art, illustration, and film-related work sitting in storage and at home.
“We ended up with all this stuff in storage and our houses, and I thought, We have to do something,” Lucas said. “I’ve worked with hundreds of illustrators and they never get credit for anything. They’re not going to end up in museums, because the art world is elitist and illustrators are seen as lowly.”
George Lucas Defends Popular Art
Lucas appears to see the museum as a way to give popular art the respect he feels it has long been denied.
The Lucas Museum’s collection is focused on figurative work, comic art, illustration, movie art, photography, paintings, and images built around story. It is not being presented as a straight Star Wars museum, even though Star Wars material will be part of it.
The museum’s own description says it celebrates “visual storytelling,” with works connected by the way images move people and shape memory.
Lucas is leaning into that idea. He is not trying to impress the high-end art crowd by following the same rules. He seems to be saying the rules are the problem.
“They want to do it the way they were taught in the university where they got the PhD,” Lucas told Vulture. “I say that has nothing to do with art. I’m not in favor of telling people what they like.”
It is classic Lucas in a way. The guy who changed movies with Star Wars is now arguing that the artists behind comics, posters, illustration, design, and pop culture deserve a seat at the table.
Art Critics Are Already Taking Shots
The pushback has already started.
Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Knight previously called the museum’s “narrative art” premise a “made-up” category and questioned whether it has a clear meaning in the art world.
Vulture points out that this criticism has “stirred up controversy,” because Lucas and Hobson are placing story-driven, figurative work at the center of the museum instead of following the usual 20th-century art narrative built around abstraction and academic movements.
Puck’s Marion Maneker also took jabs at Lucas, questioning if the museum has a clear mission or if it is really something else: a Star Wars museum, an ego project, or a billionaire’s dream house built on a massive scale.
Maneker wrote that people are still trying to figure out if the Lucas Museum is “an actual institution with a definable and recognizable mission” that will justify the time, money, and space behind it.
Lucas probably sees those comments as proof of his point.
The Banana Taped To A Wall Makes Lucas’ Point
The criticism also lands funny when you remember what the modern art world already celebrates.
Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian, the infamous banana duct-taped to a wall, sold for $6.2 million at Sotheby’s in 2024. The banana was reportedly stolen again from a France exhibition over the weekend, only for the museum to replace it because the fruit is perishable and gets swapped out anyway.
Even the X account US Homeland Security News joked in a reply to the NY Post, “That stupid banana has to be replaced weekly anyway.”
So the same art world that can treat a taped-up banana like a serious cultural event is now supposed to lecture George Lucas about whether comic art, illustration, movie posters, and visual storytelling belong in a museum?
Lucas may have a point.
The art establishment looks down on the kind of art millions of people connect with, and Lucas is using his fortune to put that art in an important building.
