A short time ago, in a country far, far to the right, a museum opened to great fanfare and much debate in the art world. The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art (LMNA) in Los Angeles is the $1bn (€892m) brainchild of George Lucas, creator of Star Wars and co-creator of Indiana Jones, and his wife, Mellody Hobson. When the futuristic Ma Yansong-designed building recently opened its doors to the public, many critics took the museum’s apparent anti-intellectualism as a Death Star-style attack on the Western museum. The LMNA – which, in a conscious effort to elevate the art of illustration, employs a laconic labelling system and prioritises experience over academic explanation – stands accused of collapsing the supposed boundaries between high and low culture.
The question at the heart of the row is a simple one: should an art museum make us think or feel? Describing the LMNA as everything from “upending the art world” to bringing “the history of the Western art museum to its inevitable conclusion”, the critics seem to suggest that the experience of art is somehow separate to understanding it. Lucas disagrees. In an interview with Vogue, the world-builder put his cards on the Sabacc table. “My feeling is that art is emotional,” he said. “It’s not intellectual. Are you emotionally connected to it? If you’re connected, it’s art. And if you’re not, then it’s not art.”
Lucas isn’t alone. As LMNA was lambasted across the media galaxy, the Fondation Beyeler unveiled three new buildings by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor in a picturesque slice of suburban Basel. Forming part of its “expanded ensemble”, the additions meld into a now-public parkland that all but doubles the footprint of Switzerland’s most-visited museum (more on this in Monocle’s just-published Design Directory).
Like Lucas, Zumthor builds superstructures on the foundation of his beliefs. His architectural style leans on feelings through spaces that prioritise sensory experience and emotional resonance. “Feelings encompass much more than thinking,” he says. “Your emotions contain things that you don’t even consciously remember.” This is not to say that Zumthor dismisses intellect out of hand. “But let’s not make museums too didactical,” he adds.
Lucas and Zumthor’s desire to do away with art-world didacticism is at odds with the view of critics who believe that museums are essentially places that provide context, interpretation and intellectual architecture for the understanding of art. But these are not just places to think and contextualise; they’re also places to stretch out emotionally, to reach for fresh feelings and new ways of understanding ourselves. Meanwhile, one critic wrote that he left the LMNA disappointed because he failed to learn anything beyond what he already knew, which sounds suspiciously like someone who went in search of facts and was frustrated to find art.
Just as impressionism emerged as a reaction to the stale sobriety of academic painting, art museums that premise feeling and sensuality are not aberrations but natural reactions to the heady pace of modernity. People don’t want to walk into galleries that make them feel dull or stupid – they want galleries that make them feel human. Or, at least, feel something. If impressionism was “the new painting”, the LMNA and Fondation Beyeler are the new museums. The critical backlash can be put down to the fact that the new almost always comes as a shock. But in an era of heightened instability, perhaps the likes of Lucas and Zumthor are simply bringing balance to the force.
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