George Lucas has, over the years, collected a lot of cool stuff. Maxfield Parrish paintings, 147 Norman Rockwell works, original comic art from the classic strips like Flash Gordon, counter-culture comix work from artists like R. Crumb, and of course Star Wars memorabilia. In his view, Indy was right, and all this stuff belongs in a museum. Heck, he even wants to pay for the museum, and the trust to keep it open and operating to go with it. You’d think the idea of a free Star Wars museum would have cities lining up, but it turns out George can’t get the time of day.
Bloomberg has a look at the ongoing and surprisingly ugly saga of Lucas just trying to get a damn museum built. The Presidio couldn’t fit it in, and the Chicago waterfront site ultimately fell through due to the politics of the city. So now Lucas is playing Los Angeles and San Francisco off each other in the hopes that he might finally get the museum built, with San Francisco’s Treasure Island apparently a likely candidate.
Hopefully Lucas gets this museum built at some point. Leaving aside for the moment that a Star Wars museum is, well, a Star Wars museum, there’s a lot of 20th century Americana Lucas owns that’s impossible to see and may be slipping into the forgotten without a place for us to learn about it. We only lose culture when we forget it completely, and any cultural collection deserves to be placed where it can be seen.
(via Bloomberg)
