When George Lucas sold Star Wars to Disney in 2013, it was his aim to retire, to scale back his imprint and live away from the public eye. Part of that plan is to give away most of his vast art and memorabilia collection. Lucas would like to put it all in a museum somewhere. He's offered to pay for the construction of such a museum, and even set up an endowment for running costs. You'd think that cities would be falling all over each other to land such a deal, but that's not what happened.
But so far, Lucas hasn’t found a permanent home for his museum. The monumental project has brought him almost as much grief as Jar Jar Binks, the prequel creature from the planet Naboo with an oddly Jamaican accent that some found racially offensive. Lucas tried to build in San Francisco’s Presidio, which is a national park, and then on Chicago’s downtown waterfront, only to abandon both sites after being assailed by local forces. Some people derided his architecture. Others knocked the artwork. Lucas seemed to find most irritating those who said they didn’t mind his proposal but thought he needed to be more flexible about where he put his building. He had long suffered highfalutin critics as a nuisance when he was selling tickets to movies. Now they were thwarting his will when he was trying to give something away.
In Round 3, Lucas is pitting San Francisco and Los Angeles against each other as potential host sites. “Call it hedging your bets, call it beefing up your odds, call it the architectural equivalent of quite publicly asking two people to prom on the same day: Lucas’s dual-track proposal is an unconventional strategy by any measure,” wrote Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne.
Location is not the only problem. Proposed building designs have been rejected because of size or architectural style. Local response to the project hasn't always been welcoming. Some view the art offered as lowbrow. Read the particulars of the museum that Lucas can't give away at Bloomberg. -via Digg
(Image credit: Simon Abranowicz)
Maybe he can get it close to Lake Mead or something if he wants scenic.
And if his art is so lowbrow, has he tried Las Vegas?
In my opinion, Lucas should do what the Getty did after being driven from Pacific Palisades. Find some worthless land near a big city and spend his billion developing it and ways to visit it. Urban sprawl, Star Wars fans and and Uber will bring visitors.