Margaret Leigh

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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,

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.

Monet, I realize, has painted that aspect of the world that can’t be domesticated by vision—what Emerson called the “flash and sparkle” of it, in this case a million dappled reflections rocking and melting in the waves. It is a kind of beauty that the old masters seldom could fit into their symbolic schemes, a beauty more chaotic and aflame than ou

From a distance, I make out the powerful features of Idia, queen mother of the kingdom of Benin, on a mask made from a thin slice of elephant tusk. Idia raised an army to help her son, Esigie, win the throne and another army to expand his kingdom northward. The mask of her indomitable face is a particular type of artwork: one that makes a forceful