Bringley’s book, his first, tells the story of his ten years as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, what it was like holding down that job and what he learned about the Met and its collection. That’s enough to hook me; I love art museums in general, even though I’m not the most educated art fan, and the Met is an institution I love, one I visited at least monthly for the first four years I lived in New York City. I’m the target demographic, here, an easy sell, and unsurprisingly I enjoyed my time with the book.
The fundamental appeal of this book is Bringley’s unusual level of access to the museum and the stories he accumulated in his decade there. This is fun on a variety of levels. One level is simply an intimate look at an institution that many people have affection for but few understand on a logistical level. There’s a lot of pure behind-the-scenes, here’s-how-it-really-works information about how an immense and hugely popular art museum operates. This is obviously limited to a guard’s perspective, but that’s a useful and unique point of view of the museum. Bringley takes a lot of care to flesh out the personalities of his fellow guards, which is essential for the flavor of the book, and there’s quite a bit about the many colorful characters he met among the museum’s visitors. (This is the kind of book you read for the anecdotes.) Another level on which the text operates is as a series of ruminations on art, its creation, and its appreciation. There’s tons of little tidbits, pieces of artistic trivia that I didn’t know before reading, and I appreciate the amount of research at play here. Bringley shares which art was his favorite, what different galleries inspired in him, and how being a guard changed and deepened his attitude toward visual art. And he does it well. The value proposition of this book is obvious, and at those fundamental tasks - teaching the reader about the operations of the Met and about its art - it clearly succeeds.
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