On 22 September a museum opens in Los Angeles for the kind of art that most museums kept in the basement.
The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, founded by George Lucas and Mellody Hobson, is dedicated to storytelling through images: cave painting, illustration, comics, murals, film. The building in Exposition Park, designed by Ma Yansong of MAD Architects, covers around 300,000 square feet, with more than 100,000 of them given to galleries, and the permanent collection holds over 40,000 works. Members were let in first in early September, the neighbourhood got its own preview day, and the opening night was co-chaired by, among others, Steven Spielberg, Guillermo del Toro and Greta Gerwig. Early reviews of the building are sharply divided, which is usually a sign that something has actually been built.
What makes this interesting for a project about appearance is not the celebrities but the category.
Narrative art is the art that has to make you understand a person in one glance. A comic panel, a film still, a magazine cover, a mural on a wall you pass at forty kilometres an hour. None of these have the luxury of a wall text. The scientist has to look like a scientist, the villain like a villain, the tired detective like a tired detective, and the reader has to get it before the sentence ends. For a century and a half, illustrators and character designers have been running the most demanding school of appearance that exists, and the fine art world mostly refused to hang the results.
In a film even a homeless man has style, and that is the lesson worth stealing.
Look at how characters are built for the screen or the page. One reads as an artist, another as a philosopher, another as a threat, and none of it depends on conventional beauty. Many of the most memorable faces in cinema would not survive a casting call for a cosmetics advert. What they have instead is design: a consistent visual identity that tells you who this person is and creates an emotional connection before a word is spoken. Their imperfections do not weaken that identity, they are part of it. Appearance in narrative art is treated as character, not as a grade on a scale from pretty to ugly.
This is exactly the shift most people never make about their own face.
The everyday habit is to rate ourselves, to find the flaw and try to remove it, and then to rate ourselves again. Narrative art works the other way round. It starts from the question of who this person is and what the picture should make you feel, and then chooses the details that carry that. A scar, a crooked nose, a heavy coat and a bad haircut can all be right, if they belong to the character. A museum that finally gives this craft a serious building is, whether it intends to or not, making an argument about how to look at people.
It also quietly overturns an old hierarchy.
Illustration and comics were kept out of the museum because they were popular, useful and understood by everyone, which was held against them. The same logic dismisses appearance itself as shallow, because it is visible and because everyone has an opinion about it. Music is also only sound for the ear, and nobody calls it shallow. Forty thousand works that exist to be read at a glance are a large body of evidence that what can be understood immediately can also be deep.
Whether the building is good is a separate question, and Los Angeles will argue about it for years.
The more useful question for anyone who owns a face is what happens when you walk through a museum full of characters and then look in a mirror. If the habit holds, you might for a moment stop grading and start reading. That is the whole difference between beauty, which is a verdict, and attractiveness, which is a story someone can actually tell about you.
Sources: Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, press release; Artforum