Lucas invented the category in which his museum will be judged
21 September 2026, 18:07
George Lucas spent around a billion dollars, largely his own, to build the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles. The Economist visited it and writes that the museum overturns conventions, succeeding in good ways and in bad ones. The verdict stays suspended halfway, and the reason lies in the name: ‘narrative art’, meaning illustration, comics, photography, posters, cinema. Works that tell a story. That category did not exist as a museum category until Lucas decided to found a museum on it.
Whoever defines the category escapes the test
A museum of twentieth-century painting has peers. There are other museums of twentieth-century painting, visitors are counted, collections are compared, people argue over whether an acquisition was overpaid. The comparison exists because the category exists before the individual museum.
The Lucas Museum is in the opposite position. It is the first and, for now, the only one of its kind, and the kind was designed by the man building it. Anyone who says it has succeeded is right, and anyone who says the opposite is right too: there is no yardstick. The Economist, in fact, draws no conclusion, and that is not a weakness of the piece — it is the logical consequence of an object that chose for itself the field in which to compete.
The mechanism is this: when the category is self-defined, the yardstick has to be declared in advance, by whoever promotes the project, otherwise it will never come from outside. Nobody will bring it for them.
In business the phrase is ‘our case is different’
In business this situation has a set formula, and you will hear it word for word. ‘That line can't be compared with the others.’ ‘We took that customer on to get into the sector, not for the margin.’ ‘That product is new, give it time.’
These are not lies. They are true statements that produce the same effect as Lucas's museum: they shield the project from any scrutiny. And two years on nobody can say whether it went well, because nobody had written down what ‘well’ meant.
Take a plastics moulding company with a turnover of €6 million. In its established products, materials account for around 30% of sales: the typical figure for the sector. It opens a new line, invests €180,000 in a mould and tooling, and two years later that line turns over €700,000 with materials at 48% of sales. At the meeting someone will say it is growing. Someone else will say that eighteen extra points of materials cost are too many. They will argue for an hour and decide nothing.
The point is that those eighteen points are not an opinion: the internal yardstick was already there, and it was the materials share on the established lines. All it needed was to be written down beforehand: ‘we keep this line if within twenty-four months materials fall below 38% of sales’. With that one sentence the meeting lasts five minutes. Without it, the loss-making line stays in the catalogue for years, carried by the others.
‘Non-comparability’ in business is almost always false. A new activity has no peers outside, but it has peers inside: materials as a share of sales, turnover per employee, the days that pass between order and payment, the margin left by each machine hour. Cost analysis models exist precisely for this: to give a yardstick even to what seems incomparable.
What should be visible, if the reasoning holds
If this reading is right, companies that declare the yardstick before they start should have closed projects to show: lines withdrawn, customers let go, investments halted midway. In companies that don't declare it nothing is ever closed — only things that are ‘maturing’. The signal to watch is not how many new projects start in a year but how many are stopped. If a company with no written yardstick at all still managed to close some in time, the reasoning would need revisiting.
Tomorrow morning, take the last new product or service you launched and write a single line: which number, by which date, would make you say it was a mistake. If you can't write it, the problem isn't the product.
This article was prompted by a news item published in The Economist.