Patrick Bringley

A fascinating, revelatory portrait of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and its treasures by a former New Yorker staffer who spent a decade as a museum guard.

Millions of people climb the grand marble staircase to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art every year. But only a select few have unrestricted access to every nook and cranny. They’re the guards who roam unobtrusively in dark blue suits, keeping a watchful eye on the two million square foot treasure house. Caught up in his glamorous fledgling career at The New Yorker, Patrick Bringley never thought he’d be one of them. Then his older brother was diagnosed with fatal cancer and he found himself needing to escape the mundane clamor of daily life. So he quit The New Yorker and sought solace in the most beautiful place he knew.

To his surprise and the reader’s delight, this temporary refuge becomes Bringley’s home away from home for a decade. We follow him as he guards delicate treasures from Egypt to Rome, strolls the labyrinths beneath the galleries, wears out nine pairs of company shoes, and marvels at the beautiful works in his care. Bringley enters the museum as a ghost, silent and almost invisible, but soon finds his voice and his tribe: the artworks and their creators and the lively subculture of museum guards—a gorgeous mosaic of artists, musicians, blue-collar stalwarts, immigrants, cutups, and dreamers. As his bonds with his colleagues and the art grow, he comes to understand how fortunate he is to be walled off in this little world, and how much it resembles the best aspects of the larger world to which he gradually, gratefully returns.

In the tradition of classic workplace memoirs like Lab Girl and Working Stiff, All The Beauty in the World is a surprising, inspiring portrait of a great museum, its hidden treasures, and the people who make it tick, by one of its most intimate observers.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

All the Beauty in the World

Laura Mei

Wandering the wing, I feel something like a traveler in a strange and distant land. If you've ever spent time in a foreign city alone, without the language and without a companion poking your sides, you know how fantastically immersive the experience can be. You dissolve almost — dissolve into streetlights and puddles, bridges and churches, scenes you glimpse through first-story windows. You walk the streets alive to the exotic details, but even an ordinary pigeon flapping its wings is oddly vivid. There is a poetry about it, and as long as you glide through watchfully, the spell won't break.

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.

Art often derives from those moments when we would wish the world to stand still. We perceive something so beautiful, or true, or majestic, or sad, that we can't simply take it in stride. Artists create records of transitory moments, appearing to stop their clocks. They help us believe that some things aren't transitory at all but rather remain beautiful, true, majestic, sad, or joyful over many lifetimes — and here is the proof, painted in oils, carved in marble, stitched into quilts. It's plainly mysterious that the world is as colorful and full as it is, that it exists rather than doesn't exist, that people are wired to take such care making such beautiful things. Art is about both the plainness and the mystery, reminding us of the obvious, exploring the overlooked.

Cassandra Tang

My heart is full, my heart is breaking, and I badly want to stand still awhile.

The first step in any encounter with art is to do nothing, to just watch, giving your eye a chance to absorb all that’s there. We shouldn’t think “This is good,” or “This is bad,” or “This is a Baroque picture which means X, Y, and Z.” Ideally, for the first minute we shouldn’t think at all. Art needs time to perform its work on us.

Too many visitors think of the Met as a museum of Art History, where the objective is to learn about art rather than from it.

The world doesn’t make itself easy to draw. The safe route is to mimic others’ tried-and-true formulas that limit the complexity. The dangerous route is to push the limits of your eyesight and try to invent ways for your pen to keep up. Michelangelo

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