Patrick Bringley has authored, From All the Beauty in the World - the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me. He tells what it was like to spend ten years there as a guard. Can you imagine spending 200 hours over a couple months just with the old masters, or the Greeks, or the Egyptians? The best part is, he sees, he really sees the art. He makes sense of the context, and he makes it all make sense in his life. 

As an artist, I think of All the Beauty as insights into the “voice of the customer" of people who visit art. Some do it for their own good or are dragged along, others because they love some or all of it. From his descriptions of the day-to-day of the art museum, you hear all the different ways that people experience art and experience museums. What I appreciate is that he is not judgemental about how, or why people come to see the museum.m, though he and his fella guards have a few laughs at the ways of the visitors. 

I love that Bringley saw the Masters Wing at the Met as a village. You get a sense that his standing around gives him time for rich inner story telling. He found the village inhabited with 8.496 figures found in 596 works of art. In a footnote he says, if you wonder how I could possibly count all those figures, you underestimate the kind of time I have. To have that time... not sure if it would be a blessing or a curse for me. The way he describes it, I'd find it a blessing.

He says, “I believe we take art seriously when we try to discern what, at close quarters, it reveals.” I rarely think about listening to and learning from the art, especially older art. Personally, I’m more likely to try to put my meaning on art. He notes, we usually spend our time “learning about the art not from it.” This makes me want to look again and this time listen to it. 

The author notes some things that I’ve not thought about, that the many pictures done of Jesus, for instance, feel like a family album, and are predominantly about his beginning or his very end. Very few are ever about the other parts of his life. 

I find it interesting that though they are the pinnacle of museums in the world, the difference between the Musee du Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is that the Louvre began as a royal collection, and the Met’s collection was assembled by a group of individual collectors. According to a report in The Art Newsletter this week, 141m visits were made to museums in 2022. The Met had the second only to the National Gallery here in the US. The Louvre had the highest volume of visitors, and locally The Art Institute had just over a million, around the tenth highest in the world. I was at the Tate Modern four times one week while I studied at Sotheby's last fall, and over the sixteen weeks I was in London, not a week went by that I wasn't in some museum. After reading his book, I wish I could go back and bring new eyes, new awareness to those visits. 

Of course I was drawn to the story initially, because of the inside track on museum management and art, but I am so touched because this is a beautiful story of a man experiencing grief. Bringley went to work at the Met, where he could “stand still” after the tragic loss of his 25 year old older brother. “Grief is among other things a loss of rhythm. You lose someone, it puts a hole in your life, and for a time, you huddle down in that hole.” His story shows how the experience of standing still among the works of art and history helped him rise from that place.