一家博物馆没把他想看的画挂出来，于是乔治·卢卡斯用十五年和十亿美元，自己盖了一座

The starting point of all this was a man being slighted in a museum.

He asked a member of staff: do you have any Rockwell paintings here?

Rockwell was a very well known twentieth-century American painter.

Almost everything he painted was the daily life of ordinary Americans.

The staff member said: we do, but it is not on display today.

That answer is actually very common in museums.

A lot of paintings sit in storage and are not hung every day.

Because in plenty of people's eyes, Rockwell drew illustrations and does not count as real art.

Illustration has always sat awkwardly, kept in storage year after year and not hung.

The man decided on the spot: in that case I will build my own museum.

For anyone else, that is just something you say when you are annoyed.

But he is Lucas, the man who made Star Wars.

He was short of neither money nor time.

So that angry remark, he actually carried out.

From then until today, this took fifteen years.

On the twenty-second of September this year, the museum opened in Los Angeles.

Start with a few numbers.

The building is about twenty-eight thousand square metres.

The cost reported externally is one billion dollars.

Set against today's museums, that number is near the top.

Which is to say, this is a very expensive museum.

For comparison: another Los Angeles art museum's new galleries cost seven hundred and twenty-four million dollars.

The look of the building is hard not to notice.

From outside, it resembles a white spaceship parked on the ground.

Once you walk in, the feeling changes again.

Inside it is more like a film set dressed up to look like a museum.

The galleries have screens playing digital versions of famous works held elsewhere.

There is an ancient Roman column, there is a painting from a church ceiling, and there are pieces from the Louvre.

There are also two halls for watching films, where you can sit down for a documentary or an old picture.

The entrance hall is called the portal, and there is not a single right angle in it.

But the most popular part of the whole museum is probably somewhere else.

A lot of people come specifically to see this one section.

Seven per cent of the gallery space is given to Star Wars.

What is in there are the props actually used at the time: the landspeeder, the podracer, costumes, a robot.

The other galleries hold things that do not usually get into an art museum.

Illustrations from children's books, and comics, are all in there.

Lucas and his wife call these pictures that tell a story.

Though you might wonder: which picture is not telling a story?

The museum's road here was not a smooth one.

Lucas first wanted to build it in San Francisco, and local people objected.

He then switched to Chicago, and was blocked again over the design and over taking up park land.

So it ended up in Los Angeles.

What is interesting is that the museum has kept one gallery specially for the two designs that never got built.

This is at least partly addressed to the people who objected back then: you missed out on the jobs, and on the visitors.

The criticism concentrates on one very specific thing.

There is almost no explanatory text on the walls.

You can see the picture; you cannot see any words.

You look at a painting but do not know who painted it, or why it deserves to hang here.

The museum's answer is direct.

The head of the museum says this is what Lucas insisted on.

He wants you looking at that picture, not at the history lesson beside it.

The trouble is that the people who most need the explanation are exactly the ones he says he wants to bring in — those who do not know art history.

There is one more detail worth recording.

The museum's director and the person who chose the works both left last year.

The person actually choosing the works now is Lucas himself.

An art history teacher has a judgement about museums like this.

She says: this kind of museum is both extremely selfish and extremely public.

Which side weighs more will take many years to know.

And the answer depends to a large degree on what it becomes once the founder is gone.

In the end, Lucas's reason for doing this is perfectly clear.

He believes illustration is simply pictures made for ordinary people, requiring no special knowledge and no one to explain it.

That sentence is both his reason for building the museum and precisely the thing he is criticised for.

So whether this museum is good depends on what you want to get out of it.

Now put yourself in it.

There is a painter you love.

You make a special trip to a museum to see his work.

They tell you: we have it, but it is not hung today.

What would you do?