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What’s the Matter With Museums?

Objections to museum openings and expansions may stem from land-use or zoning issues, political tensions or plain old NIMBYism, but the common thread is often institutional overreach.

What’s not to like about museums? They offer information, cultural awareness, things to do and see, a pleasant place for people to meet, personal enlightenment—and on and on. However, for the people who live or work near arts institutions, the opening or expansion of a museum may mean noise, traffic congestion, gentrification, the appropriation of public parkland and a never-ending sinkhole for public money.

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Filmmaker George Lucas of Star Wars fame is aware of both the praise and denunciations that museums attract, as he plans to open the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles’ Exposition Park this December after a 16-year effort that saw those same plans rejected in Chicago and San Francisco. Lucas packaged the $1 billion, seven-story, 400,000-square-foot museum as a gift each time, agreeing to pay for all construction costs and providing the museum with a $400 million endowment—but only Los Angeles saw it that way.

Between 2010 and 2014, Lucas sought to erect his museum in a park near the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, meeting considerable resistance from groups unwilling to cede public spaces for a private museum. He next offered to build it on an undeveloped 17-acre parcel of parkland between Lake Shore Drive and Lake Michigan in Chicago, but was met with similar pushback from a group called Friends of the Park. “The parkland belongs to the state as a public trust, and under the public trust doctrine,” said Thomas Geoghegan, the Chicago lawyer representing Friends of the Park. “You can’t just give public property to a private individual.”

Los Angeles’ Exposition Park was deemed a better fit, as it already is home to several museums, a science academy and the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, where the University of Southern California Trojans play football. The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art will house the filmmaker’s extensive collection of illustration art, photography, animation and comic art.

Opposition to museums is hardly rare when their backers seek to build or expand them. Perhaps the most notable recent instance is Congress’s narrow rejection in mid-May of funding for a Smithsonian Institution American Women’s History Museum on the National Mall. It was another casualty of the culture wars; Republicans in the House of Representatives sought to exclude transgender people from any of the museum’s exhibits.

Many other opponents of museum building and expansion argue that when institutions open, public land is taken away from the public. For several........

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