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Staff Reviews
"Artists help us believe that some things aren't transitory at all but rather remain beautiful, true, majestic, sad, or joyful over many lifetimes. (pg. 178)
Just like this memoir. It's so very touching to observe and learn about Bringley and his colleagues as guards alongside the art at the beloved MET museum.
— Asia
I would pick up this book the way you call an old friend. It's less like a warm hug and more like when someone bows their head to you in thanks. If you are someone like me that finds art intimidating and overwhelming, allow Patrick to guide your attention to what a fellow human being like him cares about. It slows you to read, like 10-pages-every-30-minutes slow. And I think he'd like that.
— Marion
Description
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 TheNew 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.
