So to sum it up, this “Museum of Narrative Art” will be, apparently, a populist art museum with a strong concentration in showing movies.

“The Lucas Museum will be a barrier free museum where artificial divisions between ‘high’ art and ‘popular’ art are absent, allowing you to explore a wide array of compelling visual storytelling,” www.lucasmuseum.org proclaims. It will be pitched at “visitors who might be less inclined to visit a traditional fine art museum.”

Readers understand, I think, that Lucas has in mind more than just a “Star Wars” museum, although that movie franchise is essentially the source of the funds for the museum and for the filmmaker’s art collection that will occupy it.

“We'll have 'Indiana Jones,' we'll have 'Lord of the Rings.' We're going to have a lot of movies, not just my movies,” Lucas said in October 2014, in a Chicago Ideas Week interview that was, as best as I can tell, his only public appearance here pushing the project.

The museum will also feature Norman Rockwell paintings from Lucas’s collection, a tribute to an artist firmly in the tradition of narrative art and one Lucas sees as underappreciated.

“The Metropolitan Museum (of Art) in New York has some Rockwells; they just don't ever display them,” Lucas said on the stage at the annual festival, where he was interviewed by friend and TV host Charlie Rose. “There's a lot of museums that have this kind of artwork that they just don't display because they don’t think it's worthy or whatever. But hopefully with this, it'll draw attention to it.”

The attention in the year-and-a-half since then, however, has not yet turned to the art. At the Tribune I cover museums, at least the kind that have operating hours and needlessly complex ticket plans and gaggles of schoolkids on typical weekday mornings.

....

But as much as the Lucas Museum wants to claim a place at the table for more everyday artworks, it also wants to be, it sounds like, a kind of top-line movie palace, “a cinematheque,” Lucas called it during the Ideas Week appearance.

In the film realm, it plans to offer "a comprehensive collection of regional, national and international cinema, experimental and independent film, video, and digital media," says the website.

Also: "The Lucas Museum will regularly screen legendary archival films and offer conversations with filmmakers, film scholars and critics. In addition, the Museum will host workshops for schools, colleges and after-school programs, as well as lectures on the history of cinema, with an emphasis on regional cinema."

So to sum it up, this “Museum of Narrative Art” will be, apparently, a populist art museum with a strong concentration in showing movies.