Met Museum guard Bringley reflects on the decade he spent guarding priceless works of art, encountering a fascinating range of museumgoers, commiserating with his peers, reflecting on the works and his reactions to them, and searching for and finding peace after a terrible personal loss.
Much of the greatest art, I find, seeks to remind us of the obvious. This is real. That's all it says. Take the time to stop and imagine or feel fully the things you already know.
Patrick Bringley, a former New Yorker staffer, after facing the tragic death of his beloved brother, spent ten years working as a guard in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The slow pace and straightforward duties of the job suited Bringley, who, along with his fellow guards, enjoyed having "nothing to do and all day to do it."
For years, Bringley prevented careless, clueless, or overly passionate museumgoers from stumbling into priceless works of art; assured visitors that all of the works were real; and showed meditative appreciation for thousands of the 1.5 million works of art in the Met's permanent collection.
Bringley offers glimpses into the sometimes-mundane, often intriguing behind-the-scenes processes and dynamics for the hundreds of employees who were and are daily surrounded by priceless works of art. His shared conversations with other guards illustrate a range of motivations for pursuing the work. But time, curiosity, emotional pain, and a desire to escape from it all added to his tendency to consider the intentions of artists, the stories behind the artwork, his own feelings about the works, and others' reactions, which he witnessed in real time.
Yet the heart of the book feels like it's Bringley's observations of the thousands of museumgoers who cross his path--the strangers who enter this magnificent museum, who wander and take it all in or search for specific works of art, who greedily rush or take hours to contemplate, who are awed or dismissive, who walk the galleries and encounter a vast array of expression in the artwork and who develop their own unique reactions to it all.
On a typical day, it is easy to glance at strangers and forget the most fundamental things about them: that they’re just as real as you are; that they’ve triumphed and suffered; that like you they’re engaged in something (living) that is hard and rich and brief.
Bringley and his wife have two young children by the time he ends his stint at the Met and shifts into a different job, as a tour guide of the city, and the decade spent in full-time work standing and observing and contemplating seems to have allowed him some healing after the death of his brother.
I listened to All the Beauty in the World as an audiobook.
I'd love to hear what you think of this book!
If you like to read memoirs, you might like to check out some of my Bossy memoir reviews, or some of my Greedy Reading Lists of favorites:
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