
All the Beauty in the World

The glory of so-called unskilled jobs is that people with a fantastic range of skills and backgrounds work them. White-collar jobs cluster people of similar educations and interests so that most of your coworkers will have somewhat similar talents and minds. A security job doesn’t have this problem.
Patrick Bringley • All the Beauty in the World
No particular type of person sets out in life to become a museum guard, so countless types take on the role, each marching to their own drummer. At the New Yorker, my peers had all recently graduated from elite private schools and maybe had worked another job in publishing. At the Met, I know guards who have commanded a frigate in the Bay of Bengal
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I had visited the Cloisters before, but somehow the precise definition of a cloister eluded me. I would have guessed it was a tiny cell where a monk shut himself away to pray. In fact, a cloister was the open-air center of a monastery, a place set apart from the wider world but not from the sun, moon, and stars.
Patrick Bringley • All the Beauty in the World
Steps away from me, a visitor holds a camera to his eye to take a photograph of a photograph of Georgia’s unblinking face. In the moment it feels like a surreal thing to witness, but again I understand why it’s happening. Behind that apparatus, the gentleman feels that he has a surer grip on reality, as it can be difficult to fully experience what
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A couple of galleries away, there is a series of pictures Stieglitz made of his partner and later his wife, the painter Georgia O’Keeffe. They aren’t portraits, and they aren’t snapshots. Studies, I suppose you’d call them: efforts to see her better—her hands, her feet, her torso, her breasts, her face, her face again, her face again. She was strik
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Georgia O’Keeffe here, as a work of art, has virtues the rest of us appear to lack. She is still. She is permanent. There’s a frame around her, putting space between her sacred beauty (an older meaning of the word sacred is “set apart”) and the profane, mundane world. I think that sometimes we need permission to stop and adore, and a work of art gr
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I especially like it when baffled people ask me questions. I like baffled people. I think they are right to stagger around the Met discombobulated, and more educated people are wrong when they take what they see in stride. Baffled people are surprised by things that are, in fact, surprising—that a Picasso is right there for them to breathe on, that
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We walked through the next several galleries without stopping. If I had been alone, I would have paused to pour over the Mérode Altarpiece and study the Bury St. Edmunds cross.
Patrick Bringley • All the Beauty in the World
I strain to use my eye as an investigatory tool—as a pencil, with my mind the sketch pad. I am not very skilled at it, which means that I can get better. I look for meaning in the way people wear their clothes and carry their weight, hold hands with their boyfriends and girlfriends or don’t, style their hair, cut their beards, meet or avoid my eye,
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With experience I’m coming to know that some works of art reward long looking while others give back less, and you often can’t guess at the outset which will be which.