I picked this up at a bookstore recently as it seemed like something I would enjoy: thinking about the experience of being in a museum and how that can help you think through or process emotions. And it was a delightful book, it is short, I would have liked a little more, but it hits deliciously.
Bringley is a late-20s New Yorker who just got a job at… the New Yorker. Unfortunately his brother then gets terminally sick with cancer. After caring for him on his deathbed Bringley does not want to be part of the grind anymore and pretend to be someone he is not. Instead, he applies to be a security guard at the Met. Having grown up around art, he simply wanted to lose himself in the collection and could not see himself doing anything else at the time. He talks about different works of art and interactions he had with museum visitors, as well as special exhibitions and how the museum changed over time.
Eventually Bringley has two kids and realizes that he got what he needed out of this experience. He applies to do walking tours in the city and ends up leaving his position as a security guard. He got what he needed and realized that his life can still change and grow in many ways, and leaves to grow alongside his kids.
Now this might seem like a premise that is a little navel-gazey, but also, any memoir is. I personally really appreciated more the discussions of art than the anecdotes of life. It is cool to see what the guards are doing in the background, and I liked the parts where life and art combined, but hearing about his kids just was not as interesting to me. I liked the parts where he used art to talk about his grief or how his family has processed emotions in the past. I also really liked talking about how patrons come up to guards to ask about the art. So much of life is in art, and separating it out felt bizarre after reading about his date at a museum or his mom crying in front of a pieta.
The best part of the book talks about how some kids doing a school assignment need to learn from the art and not about the art. Because that is a thesis that I inherently agree with, I think you should learn about the artist and the context if you really want to know what they were getting at, but on a basic level anyone can learn from art just by standing in front of it. And thinking about how it makes you feel. What does it bring up? How does it resonate with you? An expert can’t tell you that, only you can. And a security guard is inherently positioned to know this as someone who is paid to stand there for eight hours a day and just keep an eye on the art.
Which is the fascinating thing as security guards are nearly always people that I simply do not notice. I am not one of the patrons who ask them questions or for directions, honestly I try to not get in trouble so I usually avoid getting their attention. But it was so cool to hear about their experiences, and even how they sometimes get looked down on. Even though they are doing what now sounds like one of the most enlightened jobs in the world, protecting and standing near art.
Anyways, I loved this. Again it is not very long and I would
have liked more about different works of art and things like that, but probably
that is enough for me to not get annoyed with the memoir aspects of it. Art is
so powerful and speaks to us so profoundly in different moments of our lives, I
thought this was a fascinating look at that during a key point of the author’s
life. And it resonated with me as well, there have been so many times I was in
crisis and went to a museum and came close to crying in front of different
works of art. Some great and some just hitting the chord it needed to.
Sometimes that is just all we need.
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