New Page — Patrick Bringley

Museums talk script

INTRO

Hello and welcome everybody. First I want to say thank you for that kind introduction, and thanks to Mark

[slide of me by stairs, also the book]

I suppose I was already introduced, but to reiterate, I’m Patrick Bringley, I’m the author of a book called All the Beauty in the World, which is a memoir about a decade I spent working as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

As you all are a group of educators, I’ve decided not to do my typical book talk but rather to give the talk that I often give at museums, where I imagine many of you take students.

So in this talk about my time as a guard I will inevitably focus quite a bit on the Met, where I spent two thousand days standing on post

But I hope and expect that many of the things I’ll be saying are true of art museums in general, and. And in the second part of my talk, I’ll make these commonalities explicit, and I have some things to say about the relationship between any great museum and the solitary individuals who build relationships with them.

[TITLE]

In fact, that’s the title of my talk: museums and you and me: on a humbling, inspiring relationship.

And as you’ll see, I’m going to insist on both adjectives in that subtitle. I’m going to talk about the way that museums and all their treasures humble us, make us feel invisibly small and perhaps pleasantly insignificant in the face of all this history and geography and beauty and magnificence. And I’m going to talk about the way that they can embolden and galvanize and maybe even make us puff out our chests a little bit as members of a very talented species that art museums celebrate.

[Met facade]

But I want to begin this way. Before we do anything else — before I even tell you how I came to have a job as a guard at the Met — I want to bring you inside this museum that I’m sure you all know very well.

So imagine that we’ve approached from East 82nd Street in Manhattan and we see the Met’s facade, which is so wide that no matter where you’re standing you cannot get the entire thing into view. And this is emblematic of the museum as a whole. I spent two thousand days standing inside the museum but it might have been fifty thousand, and I still wouldn’t have been able to wrap my mind all the way around it.

But I’ll tell you what a guard sees when he looks at this facade. I think to myself, well, down on 80th street to the south you have the parking garage entrance.

[Facing north]

Fully four blocks north at 84th street you have the loading dock entrance. In between you have the met’s grand sweep of marble stairs that ascend from the dirt and the grime of the New York streets up to the temple-like museum. I can tell you that as a guard I never climbed those stairs I would enter inconspicuously by the loading dock on east 84th Street

[shot of Sentry booth]

I would pass this sentry booth here

where one of my colleagues would be checking in big nondescript trucks

[arrow]

they might be carrying crated-up statues on loan from the Vatican

They might be carrying hot dog buns for the cafeteria kids’ meals

I really couldn’t be sure

And I would follow the trucks down a long ramp,

[arrow down]

where I’d show my credentials at a second sentry boot and gain admittance to the Met’s rather vast backstage

[Redacted]

Now I don’t feel right showing you pictures of potentially sensitive areas but I can paint you a word picture easily enough

[aerial photo]

The Met sits on 12 acres of Central Park. And you can imagine that every bit as big as it is above gound,

it’s just as big below

I walk into an endless series of labrynths

It’s just concrete underfoot and wiring and ductwork overhead

And here is where much of the work is performed by the Met’s staff of over two thousand

[art in transit]

And there are yellow signs warning YIELD TO ART IN TRANSIT

as technicians in latex gloves push artworks around on rolling carts

(It’s like an ambulance, when that happens, you pull over]

And down here is where you going to find conservation studios and storage facilities and wood shops and plexi glass shops and an armory with a working forge when a medieval helmet needs a bit of repair work, or what have you, And where I’m headed is a locker room for more than five hundred security guards.

[NY mag picture]

Here is just a fraction of them.

So I’d enter the locker room and which would be and loud with the sounds of clattering metal doors swinging shut and of men dressing, shaving, and reading the Times and Post, having conversations in half a dozen languages.

[me in uniform]

I would wedge in between a couple of my locker row mates, and I’d get changed into my stiff, polyester, dark blue suit

and I’d put on a pair of the company shoes.

[shoes card]

This is my sign out card for the nine pairs of shoes that I was issued over the course of my ten years. We also, per the union contract, get $80 annually for socks. That’s called a hose allowance.

[Tie and button]

Finally I’d clip on my wine-red clip on tie, and affix my golden M pin, and

I’d head straight over to the guard’s Dispatch office.

[First Met map with my markings]

In that busy little office, the Dispatcher would find a tile with my last name on it and put it on a big board and he’d say something like, Bringley section H, which meant I was going Egypt, or section K1 which meant I was going to Greece and Rome, or some other epoch or world culture.

But let’s imagine it’s my first few months when he sent me most often to my home section, Section B, which was the Old Master paintings wing.

[Great Hall balcony]

I would report to the Section B CHIEF’s desk on the Great Hall balcony

and be assigned my post for the day — actually three posts that I’d rotate among.

[Empty galleries]

And about a half an hour before the museum opened to the public I would get on my first post of the day

And it would be just totally quiet

The only sound would be my footfalls on those wonderfully soft wooden floors you see, which you come to treasure if you’re working standing up for eight hour and twelve hour days

It woudl be totally quiet

I’d be alone except for…

[ three paintings]

figures that Goya painted, or Rembrant painted, or Rubens painted, there’s his wife Helena

And this is one of the many beautiful things about being a guard… there would be nothing and no one to bring my thoughts back down to earth,

I could think whatever thoughts I wanted to think about these vibrant and magnificent paintings

that were in some sense my companions, hanging around the galleries just like I did

and in another sense, windows onto very strange and sometimes oddly familiar worlds

[Jesus Pictures]

Often times I was posted in galleries that looked like this

I came to think of these as the Jesus Pictures

That was in honor of a man who wandering through section B, probably hunting for some Van Gogh sunflowers or some Monet waterlillies

and he came to yet another gallery of old tempera paintings on cracking wooden panels and he said

God damnit, I’m the Jesus Pictures again

[Close up]

I have to say that even though I’m not a Christian

I was captivated working among the Jesus Pictures, it’s like existing inside a of grim but poignant photo album capturing all the aspects of this one man from 1st century Judea’s short had life

[Daddi]

A painting like this one by Bernardo Daddi, it was made in the fourteenth century

And if you know anything about the fourteenth century, that was a hard luck century

when maybe a third of Europe died in the Bubonic plague, very likely including Daddi himself

Some of you will know that you too have a Bernardo Daddi crucifixion, but interestingly it’s the moments before this, with the Virgin having fainted, and someone shrieking, and the Magdalene embracing the base of the cross, this to me is the moment after the drama has passed… just sad… just loss…

And to me, these pictures did not seem remote and unrelatable, as they might to some. They felt familiar, because the emotion in them looked to be so close to the surface

It made good sense why the old masters, in an age of calamity,

would return again and again to scenes from the Passion, for instance,

which is just an old word that means suffering

and which they clearly thought was very close to the center of the human drama.

[Angelico details]

And I felt very privelidged to be able to just stand there in the galleries bearing witness to these scenes, almost like the figures that the Old Masters liked to paint at the edges of these pictures.

not studying the paintings the way a scholar or a curator would

but just being among them, facing up to them and grappling with what they seemed to be about,

which a guard has the time and the space to do and which I think the old masters intended for us to do

I found great solace in it.

So here’s when I need to back up a moment and tell you about myself, because the book I wrote is about the Met and its treasures and operations but it’s also about, among other things, a loss my family suffered and the solace and meaning that I found in the galleries of the Met.

[me as guard]

So let me quickly tell that story.

When I started as a guard at the Met I was just twenty five years old

Previously, I had had a more quote-unquote promising job, I was working in the events department at The New Yorker magazine.

[conde nast building]

I was up in a skyscraper literally at the corner 42nd Street and Broadway, and of course I thought I was on top of the world. It was the kind of prestigious-seeming job that impressed people. and somewhat dangerously for a 22 year old, i was kind of impressed with myself.

[Eustace Tilly]

Never mind that I hadn’t really lived much and hadn’t written a single word of substance or yet had a single original thought, I naively thought that having an @newyorker.com email addess was something that meant a lot.

[Tom and me]

But then when I was working at the New Yorker my brother Tom got sick, very sick, he had what’s known as a soft tissue sarcoma, that turned out to not be the sort of thing that you can beat. And suddenly my New York City was not the roaring streets of midtown Manhattan anymore… my New York City was Tom’s one bedroom apartment in Queens, and a lot of quiet little rooms at Beth Israel hospital, in the East Village. And it was clear as day that momentous things were going on in those quiet rooms.

And it was just as clear that the fancy trappings of the Condé Nast building on 42nd Street with its office politics and its corporate ladder climbing, that was really neither here nor there. That was fake. That was just frivolity and buzzy nonsense. It was such a contrast to the atmosphere in Tom’s hospital room, which was much more like an Old Master painting, to cut right to the heart of it.

[crucifixion or maybe the deposition]

And you know, i had always been interested in art, growing up. But previously, before those quiet rooms, when I had looked at a painting like this one — by Moretto da Brescia in the Met — it had seemed very exalted and untouchable grand to me. This after all is a scene from Christ’s passion and it seemed to belong to a tradition of grand ideas and images that are splashed on the walls of cathedrals, and written down in very old and great books. And I thought that in order to understand these things I would have to become very very sophisticated. And for a time I thought, maybe I’ll teach myself to write the kind of sophisticated and erudite article that could get printed in The New Yorker magazine. That’s what I thought you had to do to approach great art.

But then Tom got sick. And now here I was by Tom’s bedside

[picture of Tom]

and it was evident — it was beyond evident — that those pictures of the passion, which had once seem so exalted to me, clearly they were trying to express what was going on before my eyes.

Tom, who was just 26, handled his illness with astonishing simplicity, and grace, and the entire situation felt very mysterious and on the other hand very simple, very elemental, what was there to say about it really, it felt like touching a sort of bedrock of the human experience, which to me is how great art often feels.

[black and white Pieta]

And this was very apparent to us even in the moment. One early morning my mom, who also loves art, she and I were sitting quietly by the bedside, and Tom was sleeping, and she looked at him, with a mix of adoration and lamentation, to borrow a couple of words from Old Master paintings. And I think that anyone who’s had this sort of experience, which I imagine will be most of you, know that there’s something very beautiful about such a scene, at the same time as it’s very sorrowful, and your heart brims at the same time as it breaks,

[close up of Lehman lamentation]

and all of a sudden her eyes widened as if she were seeing what was happening for the first time, and she looked at her son, and she looked at me, and she said, “Look at us, look, we’re a fucking Old Master painting,” which she meant again as an expression of both Adoration (and love gratitude) and Lamentation (and sorrow) .

And to me, the intermingling of these two supremely primal emotions is one of thing the old masters always seem to be exploring in those luminously sad pictures of theirs.

—14:30–

[Me as guard]

So when Tom died I didn’t particularly want to rush back to some office job, where I’d be thinking about office nonsense and climbing the corporate ladder or that sort of thing. I wanted to do something nourishing. I wanted to have a role that was straightforward and honest and allowed me to keep my head up and think my thoughts and not just join a fast-moving world that seems to forget these important and elemental things. In short, I was speechless and I wanted to stand still awhile, and I chose as a venue the most beautiful place I could think of.

[Slide of people in lobby]

But of course a guard doesn’t just stand around all day communing with Fra Angelico. At 10 AM, the doors of the museum swing open and

Seven million people come into the Met each year.

That is a greater attendance that the Yankees, Mets, Giants, Jets, Knicks, and Mets combined.

And it was of course my job, as a guard, to make sure that all is calm, that all is orderly, that all is well.

And for the most part, people really did play nicely with works of art.

Occasionally, though…

[Venus]

One day I was posted in Section K1, the Greek and Roman Wing, when a young man tried to climb this ancient Venus statue to sit on her lap. And I stopped him, and he was polite, he just didn’t know that rule, and he looked at her with her missing head and arms, and he looked all around the Roman court there, which is like a kind of battlefield of gods with missing limbs, and he said, “So all of this broken stuff. It broke in here?”

So, you know, we have to make sure that those sorts of disasters don’t strike.

[People in the galleries]

And then of course we have weightier responsibilities as well, because people get sick in art galleries, and they get injured, they get confused, turned around, they need our help. And every once in a long while, there is someone who is truly up to no good.

I can’t very well give a talk about museum security without one heist,

16:30

[Hermes]

This here in an ancient head of Hermes, there are many just like it… It wasn’t made by some famous artiste but rather by some dirt-under-his-fingernails artisan who probably worked outdoors and knew Socrates from hanging around the agora… classical Athens was not that big. But this Hermes head is a little bit interesting because it was stolen from the Met in 1979 and spent some time in a storage locker at Grand Central Terminal.

The King Tut exhibit was in town— biggest exhibit the Met ever had. Amidst the hoopla and the record-break crowds, a guard turned around and noticed an empty pedestal in the Greek and Roman Wing.

They put out an APB — it was on the front page of the New York Times.

4 days later, on February 14, a call comes in strangely to the security desk at 30 rockefeller plaza. And the tipster says, “Hey if you want to find that Hermes head you should look in storage locker 5514 at Grand Centra Terminal.”

So a couple of detectives from the Midtown South precinct pry open the locker, and they move an old bedsheet aside, and sure enough they are staring into Hermes’s deathless eyes.

[Hermes eyes]

But that isn’t the strange part of the story.

It’s been buffed out now./ But a over Hermes’s left eye that had long been a heart shaped carving, maybe centuries old, or maybe just an accidental impression, it fell down and got a crack that looked like a heart… When the head was recovered it had a matching, freshly-carved heart above its right eye.

Now remember this was a Valentine’s day. So the old timer guard who told me this story — and I looked it up, its true — his theory of the unsolved case was that a guy was wandering the Met, he noticed the heart, he didnt’ have a valentine’s gift for his girl, he swiped it in an era before cameras and alarms, he carved the second heart as a grand gesture of love, his girlfriend opened the box on Valentine’s day, said what in the hell were you thinking and they called in the tip themselves.

[pistols]

This was a bad stretch for the Met, there were thefts in 79, 80, and 81. In fact there have been thefts at the Met stretching right back to its beginning, and in the early twentieth century, guards at the Met were armed, indeed there was a shooting gallery in the museum’s basement, and this is the team that won the 1934 shooting contest between the day guards and the night guards. The night guards won that year, and here they are with their custom silver trophy made by Tiffany and company.

[me as a guard]

I can proudly say, though, that I was born in 1983, and there hasn’t been a single theft at the Met in my lifetime.

But really no matter how much time I should spend telling people don’t touch, and shooshing them off their cell phones and answering questions and giving directions and everything else… No matter how many odd minutes I spent on all that, HOURS to just stand, and pace, and stretch, and lean, and to do what a guard does, which is simply to take in whatever happened to be going on around me.

[me contemplative]

I want to make this point: a museum guard’s job is very unique for the modern world. Most people are busy. It’s a guard’s job not to be busy. A watchman’s role is to have his hands empty, and his head up, and his eyes wide, and not think about any project he has to advance, not think about any ball that he has to push forward — he doesn’t have any of that. he can remain still, and in that stillness he has an incredible freedom of mind to think in any direction he chooses and in any way he chooses about both the art, and the parade of people passing by him.

[old picture]

It can feel very old fashioned, aristocratic even. I once asked a guard… I call him Troy in my book… he was a very dignified older man, and I asked him why he became a guard at the Met. “Well, the only thing I’ve ever wanted to be is an independently wealthy patron of the art, and this comes closest.”

Another veteran guard once he gave me this advice, he said, “when you get bored of the art, you watch the people. When you’re bored with the people, you look at the art.” But in truth I didnt’ very often get bored while I was on post. I think in part because time works very differently when you have oabsolute GOBS of it.

[Swipe]

If you’ve got 45 minutes to kill that can be agonizing. But i if you 12 hours to kill, you can’t kill, you just have to make peace, you have to accept that the hours are going to be very very capacious, each one is going to feel an hour long, and on a good day, that was good, Because there was so much to explore.

[Egypt]

After all, I would sometimes spend one day in Ancient Egypt

[Contemporary]

And the next day with Jackson Pollock

[Power figures]

And maybe I’d end my week hanging out with the Congolese power figures.

[overhead shot]

As a guard, you get to learn your way around every nook and cranny of a twelve acre museum, but you also have the time to reckon — right out in the open, in the middle of galleries —

[Chinese painting]

with just how much you do not know. More so I think than the museum’s curators, who spend most of their time in offices, developing very refined and sophisticated knowledge in the area where they are expert.

For me, as a guard, I never felt like an expert of anything, because I’d spend eight hours with this set of gods,

[gods]

then another eight hours with another set of gods,

[more gods]

and frankly I was never tempted to be an expert in a narrow field… it felt like the more unique thing I could do is to try and try and happily fail to wrap my mind around all of it. Which is how I think most regular people like you and me relate to an art museum.

[Dervish]

And I do think that a lot of good comes from that effort. This fellow right here, he’s a 16th century Sufi, and he spent his time trying to have direct mystical experience of and grapple with the infinite greatness of God, with reality with a capital R. And guess what… he wasn’t going to succeed at that. But it was the practice, it was the attempt, that made his life meaningful.

[athena and buddha]

When an ancient Greek person came into contact with a god, they called that an epiphany. At an art museum you also come face to face with golds. They’re made of stone and bronze, but the important thing still is to have, to have epiphanies, which you CAN do, because you are coming in contact with objects that by dint of their great beauty or delicacy or pathos or whatever else, communicate something that could not otherwise be expressed, that often feel beyond words.

It’s very different than reading ABOUT THE GREEKS, or ABOUT Japanese Buddhism… at a museum you see what the Greek’s though wisdom LOOKED LIKE, or maybe you get a taste, a little taste, of enlightenment looking at this 900 year old statue with its cracking goldlead glittering under the light.

[People watch]

And in all these different wings of the Met, which have atmospheres that are very distinct from one another, I would get to do the other major thing that a guard does: people watch, I’d get to watch people from five borough, fifty states, and six continents, people who were young and old, and fancy and not fancy, and many of these people would see me standing in a corner, looking sort of approachable in a cheap and somewhat threadbare suit, and they’d turn to each other and say, “Let’s ask this guy,” and they’d ask me questions.

[Me as a guard]

They’d ask me for the Mona Lisa. They’d ask me for the dinosaurs. They’d ask me if that or that object was really REAL. “Really, it’s really real?” I’d get sophisticated questions too of course, but it was often these bewildered people with big saucer eyes and their heads on a swivel who started the best, most open conversations. And I really appreciated them. Because, first of all, none of us knows anything really… I’d be just as ignorant as many of their places of work. And looking at their astonishment and seeing how they’re all spun around, I’d think, “that’s right.”

[Met]

That’s how we should all feel in a place like the Met that’s so big along so many axes. I don’t care if you’re a curator, if you’re the director, no one knows more than a sliver of all that’s inside this place, and even of the sliver you do know, you don’t have your mind wrapped all the way around it, not when it’s about life and death and suffering and the gods and the cosmos and everything else. We should all feel spun around inside the Met.

My very BEST conversations though were with people were with people who happened to be wearing my same suit of clothes.

[Guards on stairs]

That is of course with my fellow guards.

[Great Hall]

So let me tell you just a bit about the guards at the Met… This is the Met’s Great Hall. And sometimes I would be assigned there, to Section C, and I’d work what the guards called “points” or “checkpoints.” This meant I would be standing with a partner at one of three entrances into the galleries making sure that people were wearing their little tin pin.

[pins]

Some of you remember these pins.

[guards close up]

Anyhow what that really means is that I’d be having an eighth hour or twelve hour conversation with a partner. Now remember that there are over five hundred guards. So i didn’t know nearly everybody, and if I’m working points with an old timer he might not even bother asking my name but still over the course of the day, if I kept plying him with questions, I’d hear his whole life story.

[Sohan]

About 40% of New York City is foreign born. I’d guess that about half the guards are foreign born. They’re from really every country but there are also little pockets… there are a ton of Albania, there are a ton from Guyana…

The longestest serving person in the security department is who I call in the book Chief Singh, he’s standing at the center there. I think he has almost fifty years, before he retired… His son, Dr. Singh, is an obstetrician,

[Tara and baby]

and he delivered my two children. That’s the sort of family I ended up making at the Met.

[Swipe]

A ton of guards are artists. And indeed, here are two issus of Sw!pe Magazine, which are entirely filled with art that’s made by Metropoltian Museum of Art security guards.

[Emilie quilt]

I’ll share briefly this wonderful quilt made by Emilie Lemakis, partly out of old security department uniforms… That’s a yellow infraction ticket she’s folded into a paper airplane… You get those when you’re late to work…

[subway]

But the wonderful thing about the guards is not that they’re all artists, it’s that they really are just EVERYBODY.

[Conde Nast]

When I worked at The New Yorker, almost all my colleagues had been to a school more or less like mine, and usually they had followed a pretty straight path into the publishing business.

[Emilie again]

But hardly anyone followed a straight path to become a guard at the Met,

And the result is that the guard corps roughly resembles what you might find on a Queens-bound train at rush hour

[train]

It’s everybody… diverse in backgrounds but also in styles of thinking, styles of BEING really, and I say this without exaggeration… its five hundred men and women in dark blue suits are probably the richest collection of anything this great world museum has, and it creates an incredible richness to how they relate to the museum’s other collections

[Joseph]

This is my good friend I call Joseph in the book, to pick an example. He’s holding my son who is now ten years old.

He’s from West Africa. And he just retired last December.

And I want to show Joseph’s favorite gallery in the Met.

[Astor Court]

It’s a scholar’s garden from Ming Dynasty China that you enter through its famous moon gate.

The legend above that moon gate says “In search of quietude.”

And in the back left corner there is another entrance, the sun gate, with its legend, Elegant Repose

And when I give tours I like to end them here because a scholar’s garden is designed to exist as a world in miniature, just like the Met is, and I think we come to the Met in search of quietude,

[Guard mark]

and I like to think that I spent much of ten years leaning on walls in a kind of elegant repose. This by the way is what’s known in the trade as a “guard mark.” That’s from a hundred plus years of guys leaning on stone in blue polyester suits

[Dinner]

But the Met’s also a world in miniature in this sense… Two thousand people work there, and I found community and fellowship with people like Joseph, that went a long way in helping fall back into rhythm with the world. And maybe not be quite so speechless anymore, which is one of the narrative arcs of my book.

And at this retirement dinner, Joseph was showing us pictures of the house he’s building himself in Ghana, where he’s going to retire half the year,

And I said, Joseph that’s the Moon Gate!

[Joseph house]

So here you have a guy from Chicago, taking to a guy from Togo, about a Chinese scholar’s garden, in New York City, that he’s building across the world in Ghana… and that’s the sort of world that we all get to live in and I was very privileged to be a part of it.

-30-

[slide: Museums and You and Me]

So at this point I want to pivot to explicit lessons that I learned, lessons about the relationship between one the world’s great art museums and any solitary individual, you, me, or the guard who’s standing in the corner.

Because I think there are two ways that we could be looking at this. On the one hand, any one of us is a tiny, trifling, insignificant thing, or can feel that way, as we’re walking through our favorite museums and wandering

[map 1]

perhaps from Classical Athens to the Amsterdam of the Dutch Golden Age to 11th century Cambodia to 16th century Benin, and seeing all of these wondrous things made over the course of many centuries on several continents,

[collage of objects]

things reminding us of just how big this world is, and full, and diverse, and old, and how it’s wholly unconcerned with the minutiae that’s going on in our lives. And we can get the feeling that we can get lying on the grass and looking up at the night time stars.

[stars]

In short, we feel very very small, pleasantly small, compared to this universe of treasures and all that they represent.

[hand scrolls]

Let me give you one example of how this might work even confronting an individual work of art. This is a Chinese hand scroll in the Met, it’s by Wang Fu, it’s six hundred years old, and in the old days, it would never have been fully unfurled as it is at a museum, where it’s 11 inches talk and about 20 feet long. You would have held this in your hands, and slowly turned, and your eye would have taken a walk, essentially, a slow walk through an unfurling landscape.

[scroll 2]

This work of art, therefore, had a dimension of time. You couldn’t just look at it, the way you might look quickly at an oil painting and judge it in a moment or two. You had to WATCH IT, to watch it slow progress.

[scroll 3

And in order to watch something, as every guard knows, you need to get out of the way of the thing you’re watching, you need to sort of lean back, and forget yourself, and quiet your thoughts, and allow your eye to sort of soften and become penetrate and to take in all the details of what’s happening without passing judgment or even thinking any thoughts at all. You’re just watching, to see what’s happening, to see what’s there.

[scroll 4]

So imagine that you start at the far right end of the hand scroll, where it begins, and at first head is filled with all sorts of thoughts, you’re annoyed there was a line at the bathroom, you’ve dropped your map, your mind is filled with all that junk, but you begin to really look… and it’s beautiful… and you take a few deep breaths, it’s almost like you’ve shrunk yourself way down and you’re in this scene, taking a hike through these mountains and on the banks of this river. And just like on a hike, you get quieter and quieter as you go, because you’re falling into rhythm with the sort of speechless majesty of what you see.

[scroll 5]

And art is very capable of depicting that, because art is itself speechless; unlike language it’s very direct and concrete, so it reminds of nature as it actually is. And you begin to notice things that are straightforwardly beyond words, that sort of fall in between the cracks of what you have names for.

[collage]

Then, we’ve you’ve reached the end of the twenty foot scroll, I would advise you to stay quiet, to keep hiking, to keep wandering, to stretch those minutes of watching into hours of watching, as you explore the vastness and mystery and beauty of the world and this unexplainable existence. This, I think, is your first duty in an art museum. To feel small.

[second collage]

But there’s another way of thinking about art museums that turns this on its head. Because maybe it’s the case that everything in these museums… all of the statues in its courtyards and the paintings on its walls, the armor, the altarpieces — maybe their entire collections are really just showcasing the talents and capacities of human beings, of you, of me, and we should feel proud and empowered and challenged and engaged, rather than silent and invisible and small.

[pic of a people and Vincent / baby]

Maybe art museums are ABOUT what a lot of artists across the ages who had hands and hearts and heads very much like our own, were able to do with those intellects and imagination and stores of experience, and by implication, what you and I might do. We belong to an extremely impressive species, and maybe WE are the great big thing, the vast and inexhaustible thing, and these great art museums are just trying to do us justice. Museums are made of brick and mortar and full of stone and canvas and bronze, they’re extremely impressive, but why should we be intimidated by them? They’re inanimate, and we’re alive, and museums are an ode to us.

So that’s the second view. The second perspective.

[slide]

One thing I like to stress is that the Met isn’t a museum of art history, not really. It’s a museum that’s about, as we were saying, life and death and everything else. It’s a museum whose interests reach up into the heavens, and down into worm ridden tombs, touching on virtually every aspect of how it feels and what it means to live in the space between them.

None of these are topics that we can or should leave to the experts, the curators upstairs. A PhD isn’t going to teach you the answers to these questions. It takes all sorts of people, who have lived all sorts of different lives, who have suffered, who have loved, who value different things, to puzzle through them.

Art history is wonderful, don’t mistake me. But it’s not enough to learn ABOUT art. We should also learn FROM it.

[people collage]

So this is the second half of my advice… after you’re through feeling pleasantly small, after you’ve had those hours of quietly watching and wandering, you should, at some point, bring your whole self into the galleries, your most earnest self, your most serious self, your most unafraid self, and contribute to this important enterprise of figuring out what to make of all this.

[kouros]

The ancient Greek stone carver who carved the Met’s famous kouros statue, he didn’t want you to think, oh, this was made in the Archaic period, and that’s distinct from the Geometric period in these ways, and distinct from the classical period in these ways… He didn’t know about any of those periods, and he, like many or most of the artists across the ages, had no idea he was making art that was going to be studied in museums one day.

He thought he was making a grave marker, for one particular young man who had died, perhaps in battle, in or around Athens about two and a half thousands years ago.

And he thought that you, the viewer, would be thinking about this young man, and perhaps pouring librations out before him for the gods,

And he probably imagined you looking down toward the earth, toward the underworld, where the young man’s soul had fled,

[black]

which the Greeks perceived of as a kind of dark and vague and indistinct region, formless, bloodless, unknownable, in every way the opposite of life as the Greeks conceived it.

[Kouros]

And then he probably imagined you lifting your eyes, and seeing his creation, which is a depiction of life as the Greeks conceived it. A beautiful youth, naked, upright, vital, in one sense almost divine — after all the gods shared this form, which the Greeks thought was plainly and obviously the most beautiful and elegant and balance and harmonious form in creation — but in another sense, completely vulnerable, totally unarmored, piercable by whatever arrows are shot at us. The two realities of being human. (one hand) beautiful and possessed of god-like potential. (other hand) vulnerable, unprotected, our lives fleeting.

[other kouros collage]

To me, the Kouros, which is carved at this wonderful moment where artists are just learning how to realize this form, and aren’t yet formulaic about it, aren’t yet glib, it’s such a wonderful blend of the two — looking noble and arrogant and also a touch awkward and uncertain and adolescent, which tends to remind me that the Greeks were just feeling their way through all these problems, the same way we are.

[Kouros with doc]

And what do YOU make of it? is the point. What do you make of life, and of our talented species, to which you belong just the same as the Greeks did, and this vitality that courses through you and the keeps you upright, and the death you’re headed towards. Because if you’re alone in the gallery with the kouros, you’re the living thing, you’re the one who can think all these very Greek thoughts and keep them alive, he’s just made out of stone.

EXCERPT

And I’d like to end this book talk with just a little bit of practical advice that I give at the end of this book, advise how YOU might put a great art museum to good use.

This is an excerpt, and I’m addressing myself silently to the crowds I see flowing up the Grand Staircase on my last day.

And I say:

You are now entering a world in miniature, its terrain stretching from the mudflats of Mesopotamia to the cafes of Left Bank Paris and a thousand other places where humankind has really outdone itself. First, just get lost in the vastness of it all. Leave your meaner thoughts on the doorstep and try to feel, pleasantly, like a tiny insignificant speck afloat in a storehouse of beautiful things.

Come in the morning if you can, when the museum is quietest, and at first say nothing to anybody, not even a guard. Look at artworks with wide, patience, receptive eyes, and give yourself time to discover their details as well as their overall presence, their wholeness. You may not have words to describe your sensations, but try to notice them anyway. Hopefully, in the silence and the stillness, you’ll experience something uncommon or unexpected.

Learn everything you can about an object’s maker, culture, and intended meaning — typically, a humbling process. But at some point, you’ll want to switch gears and throw in your own two cents. The Met is a place where, with your own eyes, you can see what fellow fallible humans have made of the world that you live in. You’re qualified to weigh in on the biggest questions artworks raise. So under the cover of no one hearing your thoughts, think brave thoughts, searching thoughts, painful thoughts, and maybe foolish thoughts, not to arrive at right answers but to better understand the human mind and heart as you put both to use. Find out what you live in the Met, what you learn from, and what you can use as fuel, and venture back into the world carrying something with you, something that doesn’t fit quite easily into your mind, that weighs on you as you go forward and changes you a little bit.

[Final slide]

So again, thank you so much everybody. I’ll leave you by inviting you to keep in touch with me.

People ask me what I’m doing with myself these days, and here’s your answer… I’m giving a lot of talks. I’ve spoken at the Met, the MFA Boston, Peabody Essex Museum, Saint Louis Art Museum… I’m flying off to Dubai in a week if you can believe it… so if any of you have ties with an organization who hosts talks like this one, I’d be very interested.

And I’m also doing tours of the Met, once a month I give a public tour and more frequently I give private tours, and this has really been an extraordinary thing for me, having sort of rolling conversations in the galleries with all sorts of interesting people who read my book and reach out. So if any of you would be interested in that or know other art world people who might be, I’d appreciate if you got in touch.

Again, once more, thank you, and if you have any questions, I’ll be happy to field them.