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. Once enough people go along with some absurd aesthetic take, bad taste, and an obsession with the counterintuitive or novel over the actually agreeable, it becomes the consensus. That’s why architecture today compares so badly with the architecture of the past. In film, this pretension takes the form of self-appointed cinephiles preferring movies that are boring, inaccessible, or in foreign languages. Which is not to say that there are not movies I personally deem wonderful, despite being boring and in a foreign language, but that some portion of the cinephile’s preference for such movies is that liking them sets him off from the filmic plebs. Visitors look at an exhibit in the Normal Rockwell section of the new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art on Sept. 22 in Los Angeles. (Ario Tama/Getty Images) The result of this is that our grand temples to art, our museums, are full of things that the snobbish elite likes, but very few members of the general population think much of. I don’t know what is in George Lucas’s mind, but if I had told a story that has generated over $45 billion because so many people actually understand it and find it accessible, I would find all this exclusionary posturing hard to stomach. I would feel confident asserting that I know what people really find compelling. And that’s why I think Lucas created this institution, which is based on a premise so radical it had never occurred to the art world before: a museum of stuff people actually and uncomplicatedly enjoy. In over 100,000 square feet of gallery spaces, theaters, libraries, and restaurants inside the sci-fi spaceship-esque building designed by the Chinese star architect Ma Yansong, the museum displays both priceless masterpieces and illustrations that an antique shop could conceivably fail to sell. There are also murals, statuary, and movie props. Lifesize props from Star Wars draw crowds, but they are a small part of the overall experience. Here you can see mockups for ads for classic Westerns, statues of Pikachu, and a remarkable gallery of some of the most formative sketches in the history of anime. Many depict scenes involving swords, dragons, mythical giant spiders, and the like. A large proportion of the works are funny. One exhibit highlights incredibly moving illustrations from children’s books. It’s striking to see the works from nerddom, some of whose style is more redolent of a Magic: The Gathering trading card than the Dutch masters, presented with all the pomp that the Louvre gives to the Mona Lisa. They are shown mainly in fine frames across expertly lit, sterile, broad white walls. As when walking through the Whitney, your shoes clomp importantly on the hardwood floor, and echo off the walls if you have leather soles, though most of the ample crowd on the day I visited was wearing sneakers. People take a photo with R2-D2 and C-3P0 while visiting the “Star Wars in Motion” exhibit at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles, California. (Mario Tama/Getty Images) None of which should give the impression that the museum actively foreswears works that are broadly accepted by the art world. You will find Banksys and Diego Riveras. The Norman Rockwell gallery — one of six dedicated to specific artists alongside those on general concepts, such as motherhood, cinema, childhood, and comics — features the standout item in the whole collection, Rockwell’s The Connoisseur. The painting, published as a cover of the Saturday Evening Post in 1962, depicts a man pensively viewing a Jackson Pollock painting, and its thesis is, I think, the same as the first three paragraphs of this essay. Other memorable works include the pair of lions anyone would recognize as the ones that sit outside the New York Public Library, only one of their mouths is dripping with blood and clutching a lion tamer’s whip. In the upstairs gallery is a work of contemporary political protest of Donald Trump, a golf cart absurdly overloaded with Hellfire missiles, two chain guns, and a bucket of KFC in the passenger seat next to a redacted copy of the Epstein files and a pair of clown shoes. (Like some Chinese anti-American propaganda, it actually makes the intended target of its satire look accidentally awesome.) The cinema gallery, with many posters of things like a bikini-clad woman riding a wolf, gives long-denied serious attention to the sheer creativity and skill that have historically gone into the movie poster form. GEORGE LUCAS FILLS IN DETAILS ON CHICAGO MUSEUM It does not take a degree in art history to understand what is appealing about these things. Nor is it hard to understand the uniting feature of the objects in the collection. Like the lion statues, everything here tells a story in the most literal sense. You could describe what is happening in their depictions in a short sentence or two. The downstairs collection on “The History of Narrative Art: Heroes, Myths, The Sacred,” comprises a chronological story of visual storytelling by way of projections of legendary works like the Sistine Chapel (here God touches Adam with the spark of the divine) or the prehistoric Altamira cave paintings from northern Spain (here members of the tribe are hunting buffalo with spears). It’s a little disappointing to see mere projections, but it at least makes the concept of the entire museum easy to understand: It doesn’t matter whether some work is high art or low but whether it says something people find compelling. George Lucas is simply too rich and too successful and too independent-minded to have to care what elite opinion about art says, and in not caring, and catering to widely shared populist tastes, he has turned his new museum into a rousing success. Nicholas Clairmont is a freelance writer. He is the former Life & Arts editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.