Musical museums

 My column deriding George Lucas’ hopes to house his personal collection of Americana in
Chicago was probably ungenerous. Maybe it was because I was mistaken for Lucas
in shopping center not long ago, and the slur still rankles.

No collection should
not be judged by its owner, and I fear I did just that. He owns superb examples
of the various subgenres that interest him, works that pose interesting
questions about the lines that are usually drawn between commercial or popular
art and what are usually ranked the finer arts.  

did not explore some
of the background to the story. Lucas grew up in California’s Central Valley,
where San Francisco beckons like Oz, and it was in that fabled city that Lucas
really wanted to build his museum. Lucas proposed to house it in a  $700
million faux-Spanish villa on the bayfront.

It would have been a spectacular site for a museum –
spectacularly wrong, in the opinion of the people in San Francisco who decide
such things. No word yet on where Chicago might put the thing, although the Art
Institute has a perfectly nice Modern Wing [ed. that’s the official name] that
isn’t being used for much.

Turn the map around, and Lucas finds himself in the same
place that Avery Brundage found himself 55 years ago. Brundage was the rich builder from Chicago whose hobbies included
collecting art and running the Olympics. He offered his superb collection of Asian bronzes, ceramics, scrolls
and ivory to the Art Institute of Chicago, expecting gratitude; instead, the AI
offered to accept only part of the collection, and an offended collector took
them away to San Francisco in 1959, on the condition that the city build a new museum to house it.

That San Francisco did, with substantial public
support – first a wing on an existing arts museum in Golden Gate Park, later a stand-alone
museum in the former Main Library building downtown that was
converted for the purpose. That San Francisco was vastly more enriched by
Brundage’s private passion than Chicago would be by Lucas’ probably doesn’t
need saying. But the fact remains that the crowds at what is now known as the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco are notable by their absence, while Lucas’ bric-a-brac would give diversion to millions in a popular tourist town the size of Chicago.

This article appears in May 1-7, 2014.