What Museums Are For Now

Three Experiments in Making Art Matter Again: Critique, Inclusion, Storytelling

The newly reopened second floor of the Frick Collection offers something unusual. Visitors can enter rooms once occupied by the Frick family and see paintings, furniture, clocks, ceramics, and decorative objects in spaces that still feel like a home.

Here, some of the most beautiful works of European art appear not as isolated masterpieces but as possessions chosen, arranged, and lived with by one of the Gilded Age’s richest families.

The rooms invite admiration, but they also demand interpretation. What did it mean to live amid such objects? What forms of wealth, labor, taste, and power made this world possible? How did the placement of a painting in a bedroom or sitting room shape its meaning?

Equally important: How should our knowledge of Frick’s industrial empire, the violence of the Homestead Strike, and Alexander Berkman’s attempt to assassinate him—encouraged by Emma Goldman, his lover and political comrade—shape our judgment of the collection, and where should that knowledge cease to determine what we see?

These questions point to what museums can do better than almost any other institution. They can place people in the presence of objects that arrest attention, stir emotion, and open a path into another time. They can teach visitors to look before judging, to notice before classifying, and to remain with an object long enough for an initial response to become a question.

This is not merely art appreciation. It is humanistic education.

At their best, the humanities cultivate a set of intellectual and emotional capacities: close observation, sustained attention, historical perspective, imaginative sympathy, aesthetic judgment, critical analysis, and the ability to hold conflicting truths in mind.

They teach us to ask not only whether we approve of an object or idea, but what it meant, why it took the form it did, what needs it served, whose interests it advanced, what beauty or insight it achieved, and what it concealed or distorted.

These habits are increasingly rare. Contemporary culture rewards speed, distraction, instant reaction, and moral sorting. Images arrive detached from context. Political language reduces complicated histories to slogans. Algorithms confirm existing preferences. Public debate demands that people take sides before they have had time to understand the issue. We are encouraged to react, share, condemn, and move on.

Museums can offer a different experience. They can slow perception down. They can place the strange beside the familiar, the beautiful beside the troubling, and the present beside the past. They can help visitors recognize that an object may be aesthetically powerful and morally compromised, historically revealing and factually misleading, oppressive in one context and liberating in another.

They can show visitors where evidence is incomplete, interpretations conflict, and conclusions must remain provisional.

This is why museums matter so much now. Universities should no longer claim a monopoly on humanistic inquiry. Nor are humanities departments the institutions best positioned to bring this into public life. They reach a limited audience and too often rely on specialized vocabularies, disciplinary habits, and political assumptions that many people find remote.

Museums begin with something more immediate: an object that anyone can see, examine, respond to, and try to understand.

But museums have not yet fully accepted this responsibility.

In recent years, many have tried to establish their relevance by revising labels, correcting exclusions, and drawing attention to race, gender, empire, representation, and power.

This work was necessary. Collections were never neutral, and neither were the categories through which museums displayed them. Visitors should know whose labor was hidden, whose experiences were excluded, and how art participated in systems of conquest, hierarchy, and privilege.

Yet this approach is too narrow when it turns interpretation into the application of a familiar ideological vocabulary. A label does not become illuminating merely because it mentions colonialism, identity, the gaze, or representation. Present-day moral concerns cannot substitute for historical explanation. Nor should museums treat works from the past chiefly as evidence in a prosecution whose verdict has already been rendered.

The problem is larger than whether museums are sufficiently progressive. It is whether they help visitors think.

A serious museum must provide context without smothering the object, make judgments without pretending that those judgments are self-evident, and acknowledge moral conflict without reducing art to a political document.

It must explain how an object was made, what purposes it served, how contemporaries understood it, why its meaning changed, and what remains uncertain.

It must help visitors distinguish influence from analogy, intention from effect, historical evidence from present-day projection, and genuine explanation from theoretical shorthand.

It must also take emotion seriously. Museums should not force visitors to choose between feeling and thought. Awe, pleasure, disgust, sorrow, attraction, and unease are not obstacles to understanding. They are often its beginning.

But feelings need examination. Why does an image move us? Why did it move earlier viewers differently? What assumptions shape our response? What does beauty allow us to see, and what might it tempt us to overlook?

The museum’s task today is therefore neither to preserve the old canon unchanged nor to replace it with a new orthodoxy. It is to create encounters in which visitors can observe, contemplate, appreciate, compare, question, analyze, and judge. It should not tell them what to think, but it must give them more with which to think.

The three cases examined here show what is at stake.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition on Orientalism attempts to reconsider Western images of Islamic societies and Asia but relies too heavily on a critical framework it does not adequately historicize.

The Met’s new costume galleries expand the range of bodies and garments represented but provide too little history of materials, bodily ideals, masculinity, commerce, and fashion itself.

The forthcoming Lucas Museum of Narrative Art proposes to reunite fine art and popular culture by examining how images tell stories, transmit values, and shape memory.

All three recognize that museums can no longer rely on inherited authority. They must explain why their objects matter and why visitors should care. But relevance cannot consist merely of attaching current concerns to old objects. Inclusion cannot substitute for interpretation. Theory cannot substitute for history. Accessibility cannot mean simplification. And critique cannot become another form of intellectual closure.

The museum of the future must be more than a treasury, a classroom, or a stage for approved ideas. It must be a public institution of humanistic thought: a place where people learn to look longer, feel more deeply, question their first impressions, and see beyond the categories and hierarchies of the present.

Its purpose is not to confirm what the culture already thinks. It is to enlarge what the public is capable of seeing, feeling, and understanding.

The Met’s Orientalism Problem

I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition on Orientalism with high expectations, and left disappointed.

The exhibition contains many striking objects and paintings, and its central subject could hardly be more important: how European artists imagined the Islamic world and Asia, how those images were shaped by colonial power, and how artists from within those societies represented themselves. But the show does too little to help the visitor understand what is at stake.

A serious visit required reading the lengthy labels beside almost every painting—many mounted too low for me to read comfortably—because the exhibition offered little guidance elsewhere. Without them, visitors moved from work to work with no clear sense of how Western representations of Eastern societies developed, how they changed over time, or how the curators wanted us to understand them.

The result felt less like an exhibition than an illustrated version of Edward Said’s Orientalism, published in 1978.

Said’s book remains indispensable. He showed how European scholars, writers, and artists created an imagined “Orient”: timeless, sensual, violent, backward, and fundamentally different from the West. These representations were not innocent. They helped make colonial domination appear natural. That insight transformed the humanities, museum studies, and the interpretation of Western art.

But much has happened intellectually since 1978. I did not come away from the Met with the sense that the museum’s thinking had changed very much.

The exhibition largely preserves a familiar contrast. On one side stands the European artist, especially Jean-Léon Gérôme, who constructs an exotic fantasy out of eroticism, spectacle, costumes, weapons, and architecture borrowed from different places and periods. On the other stands Osman Hamdi Bey, the Ottoman painter and administrator, presented as a more informed and authentic observer of the world Gérôme merely imagined.

Yes, Gérôme often turned the Islamic world into a theater of fantasy. His paintings look realistic, but the precision is deceptive, assembling real objects and architectural details into scenes that never existed.

Yet the insider-outsider contrast is too simplistic. Hamdi was educated in Paris, painted in European academic styles, sought recognition from European institutions, and occupied an influential position within the Ottoman state. His paintings were no more transparent or accurate than Gérôme’s. They too were constructed, staged, and shaped by institutions, audiences, and ambition.

An artist does not become authentic simply by being native to the society he depicts.

The larger problem is historical. Said’s Orientalism rightly exposed the ways Western scholarship and representation could turn “the East” into an object of domination. But Western views of Islam, Asia, and cultural difference were neither invented in the nineteenth century nor reducible to the needs of empire. They developed over centuries through warfare, trade, diplomacy, pilgrimage, religious conflict, missionary activity, scholarship, translation, travel, and imitation.

Christian Europe’s long confrontation with the Muslim world generated fear, hostility, and fantasies of danger and sensual excess. Yet Europe also depended on Islamic science, commerce, architecture, luxury goods, and intellectual traditions. Admiration coexisted with contempt, imitation with rivalry, curiosity with distortion.

Greater contact could produce more accurate knowledge, but it could also generate new fantasies. These attitudes changed unevenly rather than moving steadily toward either domination or understanding.

A stronger exhibition would have made that longer and more complicated history visible. It would also have distinguished among different forms of representation. A scholarly text, colonial photograph, travel poster, opera, painting, and decorative object do not serve the same purpose or make the same kind of claim. Treating them all as expressions of a single colonial gaze reproduces the very simplification that historical analysis should resist.

This also matters for works such as Aida and Turandot. Both build imagined worlds out of stereotype, myth, spectacle, music, and fantasy. They should be examined critically, but they should not be treated simply as statements about what Europeans believed real Egyptians or Chinese people were like.

Fantasy is not ethnography. Art exaggerates, combines, invents, and transforms. A work may repeat stereotypes without serving as a direct political program, and its emotional and aesthetic force cannot be reduced entirely to its ideological assumptions.

Said’s approach remains valuable because it asks who is representing whom, for which audience, through which institutions, and under what conditions of power. But those questions do not exhaust the meaning of a work.

We should also ask why these works appealed so strongly to audiences, what desires and fears they expressed, what older myths they drew on, and how their meanings changed across different periods and places.

The Met exhibition raises some of these questions but rarely develops them. It is strongest when the paintings themselves resist the curatorial framework.

Gérôme is a case in point. His work is easy to condemn and difficult to dismiss. His technical control, color, detail, and theatrical intelligence made his fantasies persuasive. The paintings’ appeal cannot be explained by ideology alone. They are beautiful, sensuous, and emotionally compelling, and the fantasies they express draw on deep desires for danger, luxury, freedom, and escape.

The challenge is to understand both their imaginative power and the false pictures of Eastern societies they helped sustain.

Great art has often grown out of bad ideas. Nationalism, monarchy, religious certainty, militarism, racial hierarchy, and empire have all inspired powerful works. We do not have to choose between admiring the art and criticizing the ideas behind it. A good exhibition should make room for both, rather than deciding the moral judgment in advance.

What the Met did not provide was enough history, uncertainty, or guidance about why Orientalism was more than a set of false ideas. It was a complex cultural tradition shaped by power, fear, fantasy, admiration, scholarship, violence, and desire.

A museum exhibition should do more than apply a theory to works of art. It should also explain how that theory arose, what it reveals, and what it leaves out.

The Met’s Costume Gallery Has an Interpretation Problem

The location of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new Costume Institute galleries, just off the Great Hall, makes a clear statement. Fashion is no longer a glamorous sideline tucked away below stairs. It belongs near the center of the museum, alongside painting, sculpture, ceramics, and the decorative arts.

Clothing, costume, and fashion are rich cultural objects. They can tell us about class, gender, work, religion, sexuality, technology, commerce, fantasy, and the body. But they can also be beautiful, displaying extraordinary skill in cutting, draping, proportion, color, texture, ornament, and movement. At their best, they transform cloth into form and the human body into a moving work of design.

They reveal how people wanted to be seen, how societies enforced distinctions, and how individuals used appearance to conform, compete, rebel, or reinvent themselves, while also producing visual pleasure, surprise, elegance, drama, and even awe.

That is why fashion deserves a place near the Met’s great works of art. But it is one thing to make that claim. It is another to show what makes particular garments aesthetically powerful, historically important, or artistically original.

That is where Costume Art falls short. I left unsure what kind of exhibition I had seen and, more importantly, what I was meant to understand from it.

It was not a history of clothing. The show did not trace major changes in dress, explain how new fabrics and manufacturing methods altered what could be made, or show how fashion moved from courts and workshops to department stores, magazines, global brands, and mass production.

It was not mainly about clothing as self-creation or social performance either, saying too little about how people have used dress to claim rank, attract attention, signal respectability, display wealth, cross gender boundaries, or create identities different from the ones assigned to them.

Nor was it really an exhibition about design. Visitors learned little about how a garment is cut, sewn, padded, pinned, draped, or structured, how its weight affects movement, or how a designer works with and against the limits of cloth and the body.

Each of these approaches could have produced a strong exhibition. Instead, the show moves among them without developing any one of them fully.

While dabbling in the history of fashion, the exhibition is organized mainly around categories of the body: classical, naked, pregnant, disabled, aging, and corpulent. This gives the show a clear contemporary relevance. It wants to broaden the range of bodies that fashion museums display and to challenge the thin, youthful, able-bodied ideal that the fashion industry has long treated as normal.

That is a worthwhile aim. But the categories often remain labels rather than subjects of historical inquiry. The show identifies bodies that have been excluded without explaining how those exclusions arose, how they changed over time, or how clothing helped create the very standards it now seeks to challenge.

The section on the classical body reconstructs ancient Greek dress from pottery, sculpture, literary descriptions, surviving fasteners, and a small number of textile fragments. Greeks wore wool and linen, often in bright colors and patterns. But the fabric, weave, weight, drape, and color of particular garments remain uncertain, as do the ways they were folded, pinned, belted, and dyed. The exhibition gives too little attention to these uncertainties.

Yet every reconstructed garment appears in some shade of beige, reinforcing the familiar image of Greece as pale and colorless, without explaining that decision.

The garments look light, loose, and freeing, resembling the “Grecian” dresses of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when classical simplicity came to suggest republican virtue and emancipation from rigid aristocratic dress. But that image sits uneasily beside the lives of the women the garments evoke. In classical Athens, affluent women were largely confined to the household and excluded from political life, and loose clothing did not mean social freedom.

The display could have explored that tension. Instead, the beige reconstructions repeat a later Western fantasy of Greece as a world of natural bodies and effortless grace.

The section on the “corpulent body” does not present larger bodies as objects of beauty, dignity, or reclamation. Many of the figures appear deliberately grotesque, exaggerating flesh, appetite, awkwardness, and excess, so the result is less a celebration of bodily diversity than a display of the long history of ridicule attached to fatness, a history that needed more explanation.

Corpulence has carried very different meanings across time and place. It could signify prosperity, fertility, health, maturity, or authority, but it could also suggest indiscipline, illness, laziness, or comic excess. These meanings varied by class, gender, race, age, and historical period, so a large body was never read in a single or stable way.

Clothing helped produce those meanings, concealing size, exaggerating it, compressing it, or turning it into spectacle.

Corsets, bustles, padding, and drapery changed the apparent proportions of the body. Later, standardized sizing, fashion photography, runway casting, and dieting culture narrowed the range of bodies the industry treated as acceptable.

The exhibition includes many distorted and mocking images but does not clearly explain how these representations changed, who their targets were, or how the fashion industry helped make thinness a modern ideal.

That omission is especially striking in galleries bearing the Condé Nast name and closely associated with Vogue and the Met Gala—institutions that helped establish extreme thinness as a professional standard but are not themselves examined here.

The exhibition’s focus is also overwhelmingly on women’s clothing, which makes sense up to a point, since modern fashion has often treated women’s bodies as its main field of invention, discipline, display, and commerce. But women’s dress cannot be understood in isolation from men’s.

Men’s clothing has also reshaped the body, displayed wealth, enforced rank, and defined ideals of masculinity. Renaissance and early modern elite men dressed with striking flamboyance: padded shoulders, slashed sleeves, silk stockings, jeweled fabrics, elaborate hats, bright colors, and conspicuous codpieces.

Their absence from the exhibition is not a trivial omission. Including them would have opened questions about masculinity, bodily exaggeration, sexual display, and political power.

The exhibition might also have traced how male dress changed over time. The dark, restrained business suit was not timeless. It emerged from changing ideas about masculinity, commerce, professionalism, citizenship, and self-command. Men did not withdraw from fashion. Male fashion adopted a different language.

A stronger exhibition would have placed women’s and men’s clothing in dialogue, showing how each displayed rank, when men were expected to attract attention through color and ornament rather than restraint, and how military uniforms, clerical dress, sportswear, and business suits shaped the male body and conveyed authority.

By focusing so heavily on women, the exhibition risks repeating an old assumption, that women are dressed bodies while men are simply people, when men’s clothing is no less constructed, no less capable of concealing, enlarging, disciplining, and assigning meaning to the body.

Juxtapositions can clarify an idea or make a familiar object look different, but the reason for placing works together must be clear. Art critic Jed Perl points to several examples in the Met exhibition: a Schiaparelli gown with a jeweled heart beside a painting of Saint Catherine exchanging her heart with Christ; a Picasso image of a blind man near garments designed to be experienced through touch; and a de Kooning paired with a coat based on brain scans because dementia figures in the histories of both works.

These pairings are suggestive, but the exhibition rarely explains what connects them. Did one work influence the other? Do they share a historical context? Or are they linked only by analogy?

The wall labels often rely on terms such as “subjectivity,” “visibility,” “corporeality,” and “the gaze.” The problem is not that the language is difficult and jargon-ridden. It is that abstract terms sometimes give loose associations an appearance of precision without clearly explaining why the objects belong together.

This lack of explanation also weakens the exhibition’s larger case for placing fashion in an art museum. That case is strong. A garment can display originality, beauty, technical skill, and a sophisticated understanding of how cloth moves on the body. Fashion can also serve as historical evidence, revealing differences of class and gender, marking status and occupation, and showing how people wished to present themselves.

Its importance goes further. Fashion became a vast global industry that sells not only clothing but identities, aspirations, and fantasies. It links designers, manufacturers, advertisers, magazines, celebrities, retailers, and consumers across the world. An exhibition devoted to fashion should therefore explain not only the aesthetic qualities of individual garments, but also the larger cultural and commercial system that gave them meaning.

Black style should have occupied a much larger place in that story. It has been central to American fashion and to the spectacle of the Met Gala itself, yet it is largely absent from the exhibition.

Even under slavery, clothing could be a form of self-expression, dignity, and resistance. As the historian Shane White has shown, enslaved people often created distinctive styles from worn, discarded, or improvised materials. Choices about color, fit, and presentation could assert individuality and dignity in a system designed to deny those very things.

That history continued after emancipation, as clothing became a way to claim respectability, display prosperity, and challenge racist caricatures. Black churches, musicians, performers, athletes, and political movements developed styles that influenced American culture far beyond Black communities.

The exhibition includes a zoot suit, but one object cannot carry the weight of that history, which runs through Harlem style, Black dandyism, the clothing of the civil rights and Black Power movements, hip-hop fashion, streetwear, and the enormous influence of Black designers, performers, and consumers on today’s global fashion industry.

These examples would have helped show why fashion matters, connecting aesthetics to history, identity, power, commerce, and fantasy, but most of that is only faintly present here.

Visitors learn too little about why certain garments are aesthetically important, how rich and poor dressed differently, how men’s and women’s clothing shaped one another, or how Black style transformed American fashion.

The exhibition did not need to tell the whole story, but it did need to explain more clearly why these objects matter as works of design, as historical evidence, and as expressions of culture. Instead, it gives us many striking clothes without making a strong case for what fashion can teach us.

The Lucas Museum Has a Definitional Challenge

Despite their differences, the two Met exhibitions, on Orientalism and costume, share a larger ambition. Both try to show why art still matters, attract visitors who may feel excluded from traditional museums, and broaden the definition of what belongs inside them.

The Orientalism show does this by asking viewers to reconsider how art shaped Western ideas about the non-Western world. Costume Art does it by placing fashion and previously neglected bodies near the center of art history.

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, scheduled to open on September 22 in Los Angeles, pursues the same goal in a very different way. It seeks to reconnect popular and high art, pay serious attention to forms museums long dismissed as commercial or minor, and restore narrative to the central place it occupied in art for centuries.

Until the museum opens, any judgment must remain provisional. But the building alone makes the museum difficult to ignore. Rising in Los Angeles’s Exposition Park, it looks less like a conventional museum than a spacecraft, a landscape, or a structure from one of the imagined worlds George Lucas helped create.

Its subject is equally ambitious: narrative art.

At first, the phrase seems straightforward: narrative art is art that tells a story. But the category quickly expands to include religious paintings, historical murals, photographs, magazine covers, comic strips, movie posters, children’s illustrations, advertisements, and video games. Even a portrait or landscape may suggest a past or invite the viewer to imagine what happens next.

The term can therefore become so broad that it loses precision. Yet that breadth also gives a museum considerable room to examine how artists tell stories, organize time, represent action, and shape viewers’ understanding of historical, religious, mythic, and personal experience.

For much of the twentieth century, the highest prestige in the art world attached to abstraction, formal experiment, conceptual difficulty, and distance from popular culture, while most people continued to encounter visual art through stories: movies, comics, animation, children’s books, magazine illustrations, murals, posters, advertising, television, and games. The works most admired by critics were not the images that did the most to shape the public imagination.

Norman Rockwell was dismissed as an illustrator, Disney as an entertainer, comic books as juvenile, children’s books as minor, magazine covers as ephemeral. Their popularity and commercial circulation counted against them, as though an image became less important when millions of people saw it.

The Lucas Museum challenges that hierarchy. Its central claim appears to be that art should be judged not only by its place in the history of style, but also by what it taught people to imagine. Popular images helped define courage, danger, innocence, justice, family, gender, race, nation, and belonging, an influence not diminished by appearing in a magazine or a comic book rather than a museum.

That argument is overdue, and less radical historically than it may sound. After all, for most of Western art history, serious art was expected to tell stories. Biblical painting made creation, sin, sacrifice, and redemption visible. Mythological scenes gave artists a language for desire, violence, and fate. History painting stood at the top of the academic hierarchy because it required the artist to arrange bodies, actions, and symbols into a scene viewers could understand.

Art instructed, commemorated, warned, glorified, and sanctified. It made stories visible.

Narrative did not disappear when modern art turned toward abstraction and conceptualism. It simply moved elsewhere, finding new homes in illustration, comics, cinema, animation, children’s books, popular prints, posters, advertising, and eventually video games and digital worlds.

The Lucas Museum does more than introduce a new category of art. It reconnects modern popular culture with one of art’s oldest purposes: telling stories, conveying cultural values, and delivering powerful messages in vivid and memorable form.

That may also help it reach an audience traditional museums increasingly struggle to attract. Many visitors feel shut out by contemporary art that seems to require prior knowledge of theory, institutions, or artistic movements. Narrative art offers a more immediate entry point. A viewer can begin with a character, a conflict, a setting, a mood, or a question.

That accessibility should not be confused with simplicity or pandering. A story can be formally complex, morally ambiguous, and visually inventive. But it gives the viewer somewhere to begin.

The museum’s greatest promise is that it may bring popular and high art back into the same conversation.

Traditional museums have often treated illustration, comics, movie design, and children’s art as secondary because they were commercial, reproducible, or widely loved, yet these qualities were central to their cultural importance. Mass circulation allowed images to become shared cultural references, collaboration brought together drawing, architecture, photography, and music, and reproduction allowed a single image or character to enter millions of lives.

The Lucas Museum could show that artistic influence does not move only from museums and academies outward. It also moves through screens, printed pages, merchandise, fan communities, and popular memory.

But the breadth of “narrative art” creates a curatorial challenge. A Rockwell magazine cover, a comic strip, a Dorothea Lange photograph, a movie costume, and a digital game environment may all tell stories, but they do not do so in the same way.

A still image implies what happened before and after a single moment. A comic controls sequence through panels. Film adds movement, sound, editing, and performance. A video game allows the viewer to enter the story and experience consequences. A poster condenses a narrative into one instantly visible image.

A successful museum will need to explain these differences, or “narrative art” may become a loose name for everything conventional art museums once neglected.

The museum will also have to confront the tensions within popular storytelling. Narrative art can enlarge sympathy by making distant lives and unfamiliar experiences emotionally immediate. It can preserve memories that might otherwise disappear and give visible form to fear, hope, suffering, ambition, and aspiration. At its best, it helps viewers imagine worlds beyond their own.

But the same qualities that make narrative art powerful can also make it misleading. Stories compress events, identify heroes and villains, and impose coherence on experiences that were often confused or contested. They can simplify history, reinforce stereotypes, sentimentalize suffering, glorify power, and turn moral conflict into spectacle. They may encourage identification while discouraging reflection.

The museum’s task, then, is not simply to celebrate storytelling. It is to examine how stories shape what people remember, whom they admire, whose suffering they recognize, and what values they come to regard as natural or desirable. That means treating popular images not merely as entertainment or illustration, but as forces that help form historical memory, social identity, and moral judgment.

Popularity is evidence of influence, not necessarily of artistic quality. Nor is commercial success innocent. George Lucas is well positioned to understand both sides of this problem. Star Wars demonstrated the power of narrative, myth, and world-building, and also became an enormous commercial system of sequels, toys, games, and intellectual property.

The museum should not simply celebrate stories that reached large audiences. It should ask how stories become brands and how corporate ownership shapes which narratives are repeated and which are allowed to disappear, since the reach of narrative art gives it power that can serve commerce as readily as imagination.

That tension should make the museum more interesting, not less. It could show that the division between high art and popular art was neither natural nor inevitable, explain why modernism separated formal innovation from storytelling while narrative migrated into media critics treated as minor.

It could also recover the artistic intelligence of illustrators, animators, comic artists, and children’s-book creators without simply placing them inside the old hierarchy.

Most important, it could restore story, emotion, character, and moral conflict to serious discussion about art.

For too long, the art world often treated difficulty as evidence of seriousness and popularity as evidence of compromise. The Lucas Museum offers another possibility: that some of the most consequential art of the modern era was the art that reached the most people and gave them images through which to understand their lives.

The museum has not yet shown whether it can turn that possibility into a convincing curatorial argument. But its basic premise is worth taking seriously. Narrative was not a stage that art outgrew. It remains one of the chief ways human beings organize experience, transmit values, and imagine worlds beyond their own.

The Lucas Museum’s task is not simply to put popular images on museum walls. It is to help us see why they mattered, how they worked, and what kinds of stories they taught us to tell.

What Should an Art Museum Do?

These three projects offer different answers to the same question: What should an art museum do now?

The Orientalism exhibition offers critique. It asks visitors to see how representation can serve power.

The costume galleries offer inclusion. They seek to bring fashion and neglected bodies into the museum’s central story.

The Lucas Museum offers narrative. It proposes that story, emotion, character, myth, and popular recognition belong beside abstraction, conceptualism, and formal experiment.

Each response is valuable. None is sufficient by itself.

Critique can expose domination, but it can also become predictable and flatten the history it claims to explain. Inclusion can correct old exclusions, but without history it can become a gesture of present-day virtue. Narrative can draw people in, but familiarity and popularity do not automatically produce artistic seriousness.

What museums need is not one more theory of relevance. They need a richer practice of interpretation.

They should help visitors see that objects have several histories at once: the history of their making, the history of the world they depict, the history of the institutions that collected them, and the history of the meanings later viewers attached to them.

They should show that beauty and injustice can coexist, that fantasy is not the same as ethnography, that clothing can appear liberating while the wearer remains constrained, and that popular art can shape a culture without necessarily being great art.

This requires more than longer labels placed too low on the wall.

Museums should experiment with human guides in the galleries, docents, students, scholars, artists, designers, and conservators prepared not to lecture but to converse, surrounding selected works with materials that open them up, maps, sounds, documents, literary passages, moving images, and competing interpretations. They should make uncertainty visible rather than telling visitors what conclusions respectable people are expected to reach.

The museum should remain a jewel box, protecting fragile objects, preserving beauty, and providing the increasingly rare experience of sustained, private attention. But a jewel box is not enough. Museums are among the last institutions capable of bringing historical knowledge, aesthetic experience, and public conversation into the same space.

Museums can make humanism available beyond the university—not as a specialized discipline or an ideological program, but as a practice of looking closely, placing things in context, and recognizing that objects made by other people in other times can enlarge our understanding of our own lives.

Universities confine the humanities within departments, professional vocabularies, and specialized debates. Museums can bring humanistic inquiry into public life through encounters that begin not with a theory, but with an object: a painting, a garment, a photograph, a tool, or a fragment from a vanished world.

That opportunity is larger than any single exhibition. Museums help determine what a society remembers, what it overlooks, and how it understands the people who came before. Their task is not merely to preserve objects or confirm what the present already believes. It is to make the familiar strange, the distant intelligible, and the apparently simple more difficult.

The measure of a great museum is whether visitors leave seeing beyond the everyday—beyond the categories, hierarchies, and ideological assumptions of the present—and recognizing that the world cannot be understood without history.