Is George Lucas’s new museum the end of the art museum as we know it?

LOS ANGELES — The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, a colossal pet project by the man who invented the Star Wars franchise, makes no apologies for looking like a spaceship arrived from outer space. Co-founded by George Lucas and his wife, Mellody Hobson, the soaring biomorphic structure designed by architect Ma Yansong’s firm MAD displays Lucas’s vast and motley personal collection of figurative art. The museum, which opens to the public Tuesday, reportedly cost somewhere around $1 billion, and given the eccentric form and size of the building (more than 300,000 square feet), and the amount of art inside (a dizzying mix of ancient relics and reproductions, a few Renaissance and baroque paintings, and great heaps of the finest dreck), it’s easy to believe that eye-popping figure.