The new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opened at the end of September in South Los Angeles, after a more than eight-year construction process and failed attempts by the Star Wars creator who funded it to site it in Chicago or San Francisco. George Lucas, who co-founded the museum with his wife, Mellody Hobson, spent a reported $1 billion on its creation and personally took responsibility for most of the curation. It is the smartest museum in America.
Art is the area of modern life that is least democratic. The institutional art world likes to think its defining feature is discernment — the ability to distinguish between human creations of high artistic quality and those that are not — but its real purpose is giving the appearance of discernment to assert its high social status. The tools it uses to do this involve an elaborate psychology experiment built around the human desire not to be left out or made to look stupid — basically, various dynamics for social exclusion. When the art snob says something that is obviously ugly, evil, or badly made is a work of genius, he effectively puts the ordinary listener in a Catch-22, where either disagreeing or agreeing suggests that the snob’s taste gives him the ability to understand beauty more deeply than average.
