The Lucas Museum Had A Fight With The Label Maker

 

OOOOOhhhhh, The Lucas Museum is set to open to general public on the 22nd. Early entry has been going on for members, the press and influencers; and boy have they been all over the place. Some people love that essentially George Lucas gave no f*cks when curating the museum. Some people are just loving wandering it and being impressed by all the different art and props all over the place.

 

The art community... not so much.

 

 

ARTnews' The Lucas Museum Doesn’t Have a Narrative by Maximilíano Durón might be my favorite read on it as it explores how "bad" a job the art museum functions as a place of learning. One of the biggest problems Maxy has with the museum is the lack of didactics, the labels underneath pieces that give info on the piece in some manner, like the context, what it means to the collector, the medium of art even. The didactics don't really give that. Leaving open the question with a terrible answer:

 

When I asked about the lack of didactics, chief executive Tracey Bates pointed me to the
two-volume tome the Lucas has published with Taschen. (Not a single gallery copy was out in the galleries, by the way.) This is one of my biggest gripes with museums that save important parts of their curatorial arguments for the exhibition catalog: the average visitor doesn’t buy them because they are cost-prohibitive. The glossy two-volume edition costs $200, while the scaled-down 6-by-8.5-inch version is a more reasonable $30, though it is only available for purchase at the Lucas.

There's a lot more he gripes about and it's generally a fun read about how the museum might need to just be called The Lucas Collection.