Lucas Museum Is Jeopardy! Category
The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art was a category on Jeopardy! The answer to the $1600 clue was "What is kitsch?"
In 2016 the Broad was a Jeopardy! category. The Metropolitan Museum and Art Institute of Chicago have been as well, but not LACMA or the David Geffen Galleries.
Comments
A: What is LACMA?
As for the Lucas being a category but not LACMA, a TV show's local angle presumably affects its employees. Jeopardy is still filmed in LA, however, while other shows have moved closer to places like the High Art Museum Atlanta or the Museum of Fine Arts Houston.
A major movie studio has been promoting the idea of moving to the southern US. So when those other museums become categories on Jeopardy, it will signify a major sea change (culturally & economically) has occurred.
> a disappointment.
LOL. That's one reason why it has never been a category.
It reminds me of when Wendy Beckett, the nun who did a series on American art museums, described LACMA as "relatively under-appreciated,"
I admit that even though I've long known something about it didn't add up quite right, I still didn't want to grimace about it. I didn't want to be like fans of the LA Clippers or Miami Marlins have long been----2 different sports, but same type of letdown.
That's not because the collection is sub-par; she was talking about people like him who don't appreciate what they've got.
> what they've got.
Appreciation or not, the museum since 1965 - repeat: 1965 - hasn't been able to cross all its Ts, dot all its Is. Again, since 1965. Did I mention 1965?
It is better today, however, than it was originally, but that's only because in 1965 it was so weak. I'll never forget the time when as a kid I was riding the elevator of the Ahmanson Gallery and visitors (I vaguely recall one of them having an East Coast twang in her voice) said she was tired after looking at so much bad art.
Whether the quality of the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston is A grade or C grade, it's at least housed in a generally professional or major-league way. By contrast, the packaging of LACMA has long been too rube-ish, regrettably even still today too. Since 1965.
The latter still has yet to open its restaurant and theater, and the logistics of the two areas being on the south side of Wilshire Blvd further away from the museum's parking spaces, may be as much of an oops as are all the windows that cause glare
The Lucas also has two theaters, which are technically supposedly state-of-the-art, while its restaurant has a rooftop location with a view. In the case of the Geffen, its one theater and restaurant will be on the lower level in one of the building's two anchor platforms.
Since 1965, LACMA has a knack of fumbling things, so the Geffen in the next few months may be a further reminder of that.
Sam Lubell, New York Times:
[Ma Yasong's] first route out of reality was on paper. Each month he waited for Chinese magazines like Young Science and We Love Science, with their exuberant rockets and satellites rendered in atmospheric watercolors, and for comic books like “Astro Boy” and “Star Wars.” They showed him that images blurring fantasy and reality could make people believe another world was possible.
His next goal was to become a filmmaker — what better way to transport people than the big screen? — but a professor at the Beijing Film Academy saw his drawings and suggested architecture, a profession booming as China furiously remade itself.
Ma, who considers his architecture neither strictly Chinese nor strictly global, doesn’t deny the importance of form and illusion in his fantastical work. But he adds that its disconnect with “context” is precisely his point — a critique of the way modern cities have lost touch with nature and feeling.
Ma’s subsequent plan for Lucas’s museum in Los Angeles helped set the stage for his firm’s evolution from singular objects to experiential topographies — “Shinshui” writ large.
The museum’s roof is planted with alpine grasses and shrubs, woven with curved pathways. Its galleries, though fairly conventional, are edged with wide glass lookouts and a 90-foot-wide oculus, transporting the eye to the sky and city. Its podium sprouts trees and gardens, then pours down into an 11-acre park by Studio-MLA over the museum’s underground parking.
With more than 30 projects ongoing, Ma constantly jets around the world from his base in Beijing… His second home is Los Angeles, where his two sons went to high school. Ma now stays at Airbnb’s here after losing his Pacific Palisades home in the 2025 fires.