The San Diego Comic-Con, best known for the devotion with which comic book fans dress up as their favourite characters, is not normally thought of as a symposium on collecting art. But when George Lucas and Guillermo del Toro appeared in Hall H on 27 July, that is what Comic-Con temporarily became.
Amid a laser light show and bagpipers performing ‘Scotland the Brave’, Lucas and del Toro appeared on stage to discuss the future of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art – del Toro is a trustee – in a conversation moderated by Queen Latifah. ‘We’ve been waiting five decades for this,’ she said, which might have been true for some people, though not for Rakewell.
During the conversation an intriguing portrait of collecting emerged. ‘George is a collector,’ said del Toro. ‘I am a collector, but I know I don’t own anything. I’m holding it briefly for the next person that is going to hold it or see it.’ Patek Philippe would surely approve.
Lucas started his collecting, naturally enough, with comic books. ‘I couldn’t really afford real art,’ he said. ‘I love all art no matter what it is, but I could afford comic art because it was underground.’ His collection, it seems, was initially assembled through a network of secret auctions with prices on graph paper. He is well known to have moved on to collecting artists such as Norman Rockwell.
Not one to adhere to art-market norms, Lucas declaimed, ‘I’m not one of those high art collectors who buys and then you come back five years later and say, “What happened to that painting that you bought? That was so beautiful.” “Yeah, I sold it for $10m. I made a lot of money on it.”’ Lucas, unlike so many in the art world, thinks that art is for something else: ‘I think it’s more about a connection, an emotional connection with the work, not how much it cost or what celebrity did it or whatever.’ He went on, with the kind of radically democratic sentiments that might be expected from the rebel-loving Star Wars director, ‘I don’t think there’s anything that anybody else can tell you, “that’s art” […] if you have an emotional connection, then it’s art.’
More worrying, possibly, is that Lucas sees his museum as ‘dedicated to the idea that stories, mythology, any kind of story that is written to affect people and to build community is extremely important to society […] the right hand of building a community is, you need art.’ If only someone had told Luke Skywalker.
He thinks of the museum in the same heady terms: ‘I’ve worked with hundreds of illustrators in my life and they don’t get recognised for anything, so this is sort of a temple to the people’s art.’ No doubt Rockwell would approve.
