Will the Lucas Museum upend the art world? Depends if the people embrace 'the people's art'

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Set us as preferred The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, with an eclectic collection of more than 40,000 works ranging from Frida Kahlo to R.Crumb, is diving headlong into one of the oldest and most fraught conversations in the art world: What belongs in an art museum?Storytelling is the guiding principle for presenting pieces that include props and costumes from “Star Wars,” manga, graphic novels and comic books, placed alongside established masterworks, traditional paintings and a large-scale photographic reproduction of the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

The museum calls it “narrative art,” defined as art “created to tell stories through images.” George Lucas and his wife, Mellody Hobson, have also described their collection as “the people’s art.”The Lucas Museum is opening as other institutions question traditional art-historical categories.The Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s new David Geffen Galleries organize much of the collection around oceans and the cultural exchanges they enabled, while Tate Modern has long arranged its displays thematically.

The Lucas Museum pushes that approach further by making storytelling — not chronology, geography or medium — the organizing principle for an entire institution, placing illustration, comics and commercial art inside a curatorial framework.Whether that amounts to an art-world revolution is less certain.Narrative painting has always occupied museum walls, and thematic displays are increasingly common.

What may be arguably new is treating the audiences for historically marginalized forms of art as central rather than peripheral.“The cracks in the canon began 15 or 20 years ago — the idea that there were many voices excluded in what museums were collecting,” said Lucas Museum board member Laurie Norton Moffatt, who recently retired after 40 years as direct...