“Exquisite… A beautiful tale about beauty. It is also a tale about grief, balancing solitude and comradeship, and finding joy in both the exalted and the mundane.” ―The Washington Post
"An empathic chronicle of one museum, the works collected there and the people who keep it running ― all recounted by an especially patient observer.” ―The New York Times Book Review
“As rich in moving insights as the Met is in treasures, All the Beauty in the World reminds us of the importance of learning not “about art, but from it.” This is art appreciation at a profound level.”―NPR
“Hauntingly beautiful… A work of art as luminous as the old master paintings that comforted him in his grief.” ―The Associated Press
“Told with real literary gusto and an impressive command of pace and shape. After finishing this book, plenty of sensitive readers will be desperate to become museum guards.” ―The Times of London
“Consoling and beautiful” ―The Guardian
“Bringley’s story overflows with wonder, beauty, and the persistence of hope, as he finds not just solace but meaning and inspiration in the masterpieces that surround him.” ―The Christian Science Monitor
“A profound homage to the marvels of a world-class museum and a radiant chronicle of grief, perception, and a renewed embrace of life.” ―Bookpage
“Earphones Award Winner… With his engaging voice, Patrick Bringley takes the listener inside New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in a uniquely personal way.” ―Audiofile
“The book works on so many wonderful levels… that at the end you make plans to visit the book again, perhaps this time with it under your arm on your next visit to the Met.” ―Air Mail
“This absorbing memoir is also a beautifully written manual on how to appreciate art, and life. It’s a must-read for art lovers” ―Tracy Chevalier, author of Girl with a Pearl Earring
“Patrick Bringley offers an intimate perspective on one of the world’s greatest institutions. But All the Beauty in the World is about much more: the strange human impulse to make art, the mystery of experiencing art, and what role art can play in our lives. What a gift.” ―Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind
“This book makes me yearn to have Patrick Bringley at my side in every museum I will visit for the rest of my life. Having a copy of All the Beauty in the World in my purse will be the next best thing.”―Hope Jahren, author of Lab Girl and The Story of More
“Illuminating and transformative experiences shared by a guard from one of the world’s greatest museums. Patrick Bringley is a lucky guy.”―Kerry James Marshall, artist, Mastry retrospective at the Met
“Simply wonderful. This funny, moving, beautifully written book takes the reader on a journey that unfolds as epiphanies. It is a testament to the capacity of art to illuminate life.” ―Keith Christiansen, Curator Emeritus, the Metropolitan Museum of Art
“An astounding book about an astounding place. All the Beauty in the World is at once a keenly intelligent examination of... the power of art and a profoundly empathetic exploration of the workaday culture that makes art visible to all.” ―Alex Ross, New Yorker staff writer and author of Wagnerism and The Rest is Noise
Chapter Page
Author's Note ix
I The Grand Staircase 1
II Windows 15
III A Pieta 25
IV Of Millions of Years 35
V Further Shores 55
VI Flesh and Blood 67
VII Cloisters 83
VIII Sentinels 89
IX Kouros 105
X The Veteran 123
XI Unfinished 143
XII Days' Work 153
XIII As Much as I Can Carry 167
Acknowledgments 179
Artworks Referenced in the Text 181
Bibliography 217
Chapter I: The Grand Staircase I. THE GRAND STAIRCASE
In the basement of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, below the Arms and Armor wing and outside the guards’ Dispatch Office, there are stacks of empty art crates. The crates come in all shapes and sizes; some are big and boxy, others wide and depthless like paintings, but they are uniformly imposing, heavily constructed of pale raw lumber, fit to ship rare treasures or exotic beasts. On the morning of my first day in uniform I stand beside these sturdy, romantic things, wondering what my own role in the museum will feel like. At the moment I am too absorbed by my surroundings to feel like much of anything.
A woman arrives to meet me, a guard I am assigned to shadow, called Aada. Tall and straw haired, abrupt in her movements, she looks and acts like an enchanted broom. She greets me with an unfamiliar accent (Finnish?), beats dandruff off the shoulders of my dark blue suit, frowns at its poor fit, and whisks me away down a bare concrete corridor where signs warn: Yield to Art in Transit. A chalice on a dolly glides by. We climb a scuffed staircase to the second floor, passing a motorized scissor lift (for hanging paintings and changing light bulbs, I’m told). Tucked beside one of its wheels is a folded Daily News, a paper coffee cup, and a dog-eared copy of Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha. “Filth,” Aada spits. “Keep personal items in your locker.” She pushes through the crash bar of a nondescript metal door and the colors switch on Wizard of Oz？style as we face El Greco’s phantasmagoric landscape, the View of Toledo. No time to gape. At Aada’s pace, the paintings fly by like the pages of a flip-book, centuries rolling backward and forward, subject matter toggling between the sacred and profane, Spain becoming France becoming Holland becoming Italy. In front of Raphael’s Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints, almost eight feet tall, we halt.
“This is our first post, the C post,” Aada announces. “Until ten o’clock we will stand here. Then we will stand there. At eleven we will stand on our A post down there. We will wander a bit, we will pace, but this, my friend, is where we are. Then we will get coffee. I suppose that this is your home section, the old master paintings?” I tell her yes, I believe so. “Then you are lucky,” she continues. “You will be posted in other sections too eventually―one day ancient Egypt, the next day Jackson Pollock―but Dispatch will post you here your first few months and after that, oh, sixty percent of your days. When you are here”―she stamps twice―“wood floors, easy on the feet. You might not believe it, my friend, but believe it. A twelve-hour day on wood is like an eight-hour day on marble. An eight-hour day on wood is like nothing. Pfft, your feet will barely hurt.”
We appear to be in the High Renaissance galleries. On every wall, imposing paintings hang from skinny copper wires. The room, too, is imposing, perhaps forty feet by twenty, with egress through double-wi...de doorways leading in three directions. The floor is as mellow as Aada had promised, and the ceiling is high, with skylights aided by lamps pointing down at various strategic angles. There is a single bench near the center of the room, upon which lies a discarded Chinese-language map. Past the bench, a pair of wires dangle loosely toward a conspicuously empty spot on the wall.
Aada addresses it: “You see the signed paper slip,” she says, motioning toward the sole evidence this isn’t a shocking crime scene. “Mr. Francesco Granacci was hanging here, but the conservator has taken him in for a cleaning. He might also have been out on loan, under examination in the curators’ office, or having his picture taken in the photography studio. Who knows? But there will be a slip and that you will notice.”
We pace along a shin-high bungee cable, which keeps us a yard or so from the paintings, and enter the next gallery under our watch. Here, Botticelli appears to be the famous name; and after that there is a third, smaller gallery, dominated by more Florentines. This is our domain until 10 a.m., when we will shift to the three galleries beyond. “Protect life and property―in that order,” Aada continues, beginning to lecture with uniform staccato emphasis. “It’s a straightforward job, young man, but we also must not be idiots. We keep our eyes peeled. We look around. Like scarecrows, we prevent nuisance. When there are minor incidents, we deal with them. When there are major incidents, we alert the Command Center and follow the protocols you learned in your classroom training. We are not cops except for when idiots ask us to be cops, and thankfully it isn’t often. And as it’s the first thing in the morning, there are a couple of things we must do….”
Returning to the Raphael gallery, Aada gets on her tiptoes to stick a key in a lock and open a glass door on to a public stairwell. This done, she casually steps over a bungee cable―a startling transgression to witness―and drops to her haunches beneath a heavy golden frame. “The lights,” she says, indicating switches in the baseboard. “Usually the late watch―that’s the midnight shift―will have turned them on, but in case they haven’t….” She depresses a half dozen switches at once, and we are standing in a long dark tunnel, Renaissance paintings turned into silvery muddles on the walls. She flips the switches up and the lights kick on a gallery at a time with surprisingly loud ka-chunks.
The public starts trickling in about 9:35. Our first visitor is an art student judging by the portfolio under her arm, and she actually gasps to find herself all alone. (Perhaps rightly, she doesn’t count Aada and me.) A French family follows in matching New York Mets caps (which they likely believe to be Yankees caps, the more typical tourist choice), and Aada’s eyes narrow. “For the most part, our visitors are lovely,” she admits, “but these pictures are very old and fragile, and people can be very stupid. Yesterday I was working in the American Wing, and all day long people wanted to seat their children on the three bronze bears! Can you imagine? With the old masters, it’s much better―not so quiet as Asian Art, of course, but a piece of cake compared to the nineteenth century. Of course, everywhere we work we must look out for unthinking individuals. You see? Right there.” Across the way, the French father is reaching over the bungee line, pointing out some Raphaelesque detail to his daughter. “Monsieur!” Aada calls out, somewhat louder than she needs to. “S’il vous plait! Not so close!”
After a little while, an older man saunters into the gallery wearing a familiar suit of clothes. “Oh good, it’s Mr. Ali, an excellent teammate!” Aada says of the guard.
“Ah, Aada, the very best!” he replies, catching and adopting her cadence. Mr. Ali introduces himself as the “relief” on our team (team one, Section B) who is “pushing” us along to our B post.
Aada agrees emphatically. “Ali, you’re first platoon?” she asks.
“Second platoon.”
“Sunday-Monday off?”
“Friday-Saturday.”
“Ah, so this is overtime for you…. Mr. Bringley, Mr. Ali started a bit earlier than we did this morning, but he gets to go home at five thirty. He is not tough like you and me, not a third platooner, no, no, he needs to go home to his beautiful wife. You work what days, Mr. Bringley? That’s right, you told me: Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday, twelve hours, twelve hours, eight hours, eight hours. It is good. The long days will feel normal and the normal days will feel short, and you will always have that third day off if you want to work OT. Stick with the third platoon, Mr. Bringley. Goodbye, Mr. Ali.”
Our new post brings us both backward and forward in history, covering Italian paintings from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries but also a large adjacent gallery of pictures from France at the time of the Revolution. As we explore, Aada occasionally points out cameras and alarms whose necessity she accepts but to wh
패트릭 브링리 [저]
대학 졸업 후 《뉴요커》에 4년간 몸담았다. 엠파이어 스테이트 빌딩이 보이는 뉴욕 한복판에서 성공을 꿈꾸며 치열하게 커리어를 쌓아가던 어느 날, 각별한 사이였던 형이 갑자기 암 투병 끝에 세상을 떠나는 비극을 겪는다. 2008년 가을 다니던 직장을 그만두고 ‘세계 3대 미술관’이라 불리는 뉴욕 메트로폴리탄 미술관의 경비원이 되어 그곳에 있는 300만 점의 예술 작품을 지키게 된다. 2018년, 10년간 근무했던 메트로폴리탄 미술관을 떠나 뉴욕 도보 여행 가이드로 일하며 미술관에서 보낸 시간을 회고한 『나는 메트로폴리탄 미술관의 경비원입니다(All the Beauty in the World)』를 집필했다. 현재 브루클린 선셋파크에서 사랑스러운 아내, 그리고 두 아이와 함께 살며 비정기적으로 메트로폴리탄 미술관 투어를 진행하고 있다.
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인터파크도서는 고객님의 단순 변심에 의한 교환과 반품에 드는 비용은 고객님이 지불케 됩니다.
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다배송지의 경우 반품 환불
다배송지의 경우 다른 지역의 반품을 동시에 진행할 수 없습니다. 1개 지역의 반품이 완료된 후 다른 지역 반품을 진행할 수 있으므로, 이점 양해해 주시기 바랍니다.
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오픈마켓상품에 대한 책임은 원칙적으로 업체에게 있으므로, 교환/반품 접수시 반드시 판매자와 협의 후 반품 접수를 하셔야하며, 반품접수 없이 반송하거나, 우편으로 보낼 경우 상품 확인이 어려워 환불이 불가능할 수 있으니 유의하시기 바랍니다.
배송예정일 안내
인터파크 도서는 모든 상품에 대해 배송완료예정일을 웹사이트에 표시하고 있습니다.
<인터파크 직배송 상품>
상품은 월~토요일 오전 10시 이전 주문분에 대하여 당일 출고/당일 배송완료를 보장하는 상품입니다.
상품은 서울지역/평일 주문분은 당일 출고/익일 배송완료를 보장하며, 서울외지역/평일 주문분의 경우는 오후 6시까지 주문분에 대하여 익일 배송완료를 보장하는 상품입니다. (단, 월요일은 12시까지 주문에 한함)
상품은, 입고예정일(제품출시일)+택배사배송일(1일)에 배송완료를 보장합니다.
~
상품은 유통특성상 인터파크에서 재고를 보유하지 않은 상품으로 주문일+기준출고일+택배사배송일(1일)에 배송완료를 보장합니다.(토/공휴일은 배송기간에 포함되지 않습니다.) ※기준출고일:인터파크가 상품을 수급하여 물류창고에서 포장/출고하기까지 소요되는 시간
<업체 직접배송/오픈마켓 상품>
~
상품은 업체가 주문을 확인하고, 출고하기까지 걸리는 시간입니다. 주문일+기준출고일+택배사배송일(2일)에 배송완료를 보장합니다.(토/공휴일은 배송기간에 포함되지 않습니다.) ※5일이내 출고가 시작되지 않을시, 오픈마켓 상품은 자동으로 주문이 취소되며, 고객님께 품절보상금을 지급해 드립니다.
배송비 안내
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해외배송 안내
인터파크도서에서는 국내에서 주문하시거나 해외에서 주문하여 해외로 배송을 원하실 경우 DHL과 특약으로 책정된 요금표에
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해외주문배송 서비스는 인터파크 도서 회원 가입을 하셔야만 신청 가능합니다.
알아두세요!!!
도매상 및 제작사 사정에 따라 품절/절판 등의 사유로 취소될 수 있습니다. 오픈마켓업체의 배송지연시 주문이 자동으로 취소될 수 있습니다. 출고가능 시간이 서로 다른 상품을 함께 주문할 경우 출고가능 시간이 가장 긴 기준으로 배송됩니다. 유통의 특성상 출고기간은 예정보다 앞당겨지거나 늦춰질 수 있습니다. 택배사 배송일인 서울 및 수도권은 1~2일, 지방은 2~3일, 도서, 산간, 군부대는 3일 이상의 시간이 소요됩니다.
;)
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교환 및 반품이 가능한 경우 
상품을 공급 받은 날로부터 7일이내 가능 
상품은 월~토요일 오전 10시 이전 주문분에 대하여 당일 출고/당일 배송완료를 보장하는 상품입니다.
상품은 서울지역/평일 주문분은 당일 출고/익일 배송완료를 보장하며,
상품은, 입고예정일(제품출시일)+택배사배송일(1일)에 배송완료를 보장합니다.
~ 
상품은 유통특성상 인터파크에서 재고를 보유하지 않은 상품으로
상품은 업체가 주문을 확인하고, 출고하기까지 걸리는 시간입니다.
