In 2008, Patrick Bringley was twenty-five and grieving his older brother, Tom, who had died of cancer that June. Bringley had quit his event-planning job at a magazine (this one) and longed to “commune with things that felt fundamental,” he said recently. After a visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where his mother wept in front of a Pietà, he was riding the subway in Brooklyn when a thought hit him: he should become a security guard at the Met. “I was attracted by this idea of doing something straightforward and honest and useful, like keeping people’s hands off of some of the most beautiful things human hands have made,” he said.
He answered an ad in the Times and went to an open house. “They tell you the hours”—for beginners, twelve hours on Fridays and Saturdays and eight hours on Sundays—“and half the people leave,” he recalled. After a week of training (“Protect life and property, in that order,” he was told), he joined the Met’s largest department: some five hundred guards, who work in rotating “platoons.” Bringley spent the next decade at the museum, and has now written a guard’s-eye memoir, “All the Beauty in the World,” detailing a job that is equal parts dreamy, dull, and pragmatic. “You can spend an hour deciding to learn about ancient Egypt, or look around at people and write a short story about one in your head,” he explained.
Bringley was standing in the museum’s lobby, wearing a Mets cap. On his way in, he’d set off the metal detector and greeted the guard who searched his bag like a college freshman returning to his high school. He circled around outside to a staff entrance, which led into a maze of gray hallways beneath the galleries. “Like a tree, as big as it is above, it’s just as big below,” he said. On the walls were signs reading “YIELD TO ART IN TRANSIT” and historical photos, including one of a Met guard leaning against a wall with his hands at his tailbone. “That’s exactly the way we lean, a hundred years later,” Bringley said. In the old days, there was an underground shooting range, where the night guards would face off against the day guards in annual competitions.
Bringley passed the changing rooms, which have an electric shoe buffer and an office that issues uniforms: dark-blue suit, black shoes, clip-on tie. When new guards join the union, they get an eighty-dollar hose allowance, to replace worn-out socks. The job has its hazards (foot aches, leg cramps), but also perks, including discount hot dogs from the venders on Fifth Avenue, celebrity sightings (Michael Stipe once asked Bringley for directions to “Madame X”), and “the freedom that comes with being able to think your thoughts,” Bringley said.
He took an elevator up to the Old Master galleries, or, in guardspeak, Sector 10. It was Bringley’s first home section, when he was in acute mourning and eager to dwell in the “profound quiet” of the Lamentations. When he was bored, he counted the painted figures in each room of the wing, tallying eight thousand four hundred and ninety-six at the time. Different zones have their pros and cons, including floor hardness (European Paintings has soft wood; Greek and Roman has unforgiving marble), noise level (Asian is usually quiet; Egyptian is overrun with kids), and proximity to the lockers (Modern and Contemporary is a seven-minute walk, which eats up your breaks).
At the top of the Great Hall steps, Bringley fist-bumped a guard named Mike Carlino. “I trained Mike back in the day!” Bringley said. He pointed out a blue splotch on a nearby stone archway: a “guard mark,” from a century of leaning. Bringley walked to the French period rooms (Sector 6), where a guy in a suit once refused to budge after Bringley gave the five-minute closing warning. When another guard finally shouted him out, the man told his young son, “Small people, small power. It’s life.” Bringley said that guards sometimes field odd questions, including “Is this real?” (“People ask for the ‘Mona Lisa,’ too, or they ask for the dinosaurs.”) Heading south, to Sector 9, he found Picasso’s “Woman in White,” which he once saw a guy accidentally knock with a shoulder.
At van Gogh—wood floors, but busy—he greeted a guard named Tiffany Dunbar, who was on hour five of a twelve-hour shift. Dunbar said that the rash of climate activists throwing soup or mashed potatoes at paintings in Europe had led the Met guards to review their protocol: alert the Command Center and clear the galleries. She looked around; no soup-wielders in sight. “Say a person is a one-in-a-million personality. That means we’re getting seven of those a year, at least,” Bringley said. “One of the first things someone told me is, ‘You get bored of the art, you watch the people. You get bored of the people, you watch the art.’ ” ♦