He spent 10 years in a museum. This is what he learned

This is an audio transcript of the FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘He spent 10 years in a museum. This is what he learned’

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK. Here we are, 5th Avenue, East 81st. Man, it’s so big. It’s so . . . so big. 

I’m standing on a street corner in New York City next to a hot dog stand staring up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It’s monstrous and grand. It has these huge columns and there are hundreds of people sitting on the stone steps out front. The Met is one of the most recognisable institutions in my city, and it houses one of the most significant collections of art in the world. To a lot of people, the Met can seem impenetrable. But I’m here to meet a man that’s really good at getting it to open up. 

Hi! How are you, Patrick? 

Patrick Bringley
(Barely audible) I’m totally well. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
 . . .a million things. It’s so nice to meet you. 

Patrick Bringley
It’s nice to meet you. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Thank-

Patrick Bringley
How’s everything been?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Great. Thank you so much for doing this. I’m excited. 

Patrick Bringley
Yeah, that would be fun. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Patrick Bringley was a guard at the Met for 10 years. When Patrick was 25, his brother died from cancer, and he wanted to change his life. He just wanted to stand still for a while, somewhere beautiful. So he shook everything up. We sit down together on the steps and he tells me the story. 

Patrick Bringley
I was at The New Yorker in their events planning department, and in a lot of ways it was a wonderful job. But while I was there, my brother got ill, and so all of a sudden I was spending time just in hospital rooms and by Tom’s bedside, and I suddenly felt like something very momentous was going on there in those quiet spaces that were filled with sorrow, but also beauty and a kind of simplicity. And when he died, I kind of wanted to be doing something that felt nourishing in some way for my soul and my intellect and everything else. And I thought to myself, well, what if I do this kind of straightforward and honest job in the most beautiful place that I can think of? 

Lilah Raptopoulos
What makes the Metropolitan Museum of Art the most beautiful place that you can think of? 

Patrick Bringley
Well, you know, here we are sitting on these steps and they’re these temple-like steps. It’s this sort of grand, numinous palace full of these things that are from every culture that you can imagine. And it’s a place where you can go and feel quiet and contemplate those things. And it’s also a place, I mean, where we’re sitting right now you cannot see the whole of the Met, and this, to me, is kind of emblematic of the museum as a whole. It’s a place that you can’t wrap your mind around. And I’m rather fond of places that I can just feel are inexhaustible. 

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
Patrick recently wrote a memoir about his time at the Met that I loved. It’s called All the Beauty in the World. And today I’ve asked him to walk me through the museum and explain how he approaches art. And that’s not just so we can understand the Met better, but also the Louvre or the Prado or the Vatican, or even the little museum in your hometown. Patrick’s here to teach us new ways to see. 

This is FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos. 

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Patrick and I stand up from the steps and we walk through the front doors of the Met. We go through a security line that keeps beeping at us (Security scanner beeping) and into the Great Hall.

[SOUND ON TAPE PLAYING CROWD NOISE]

This is a majestic entrance hall, and it’s full of people — New Yorkers, tourists, camp groups. You look one way, you see Greece. You look another way, you see Egypt. There’s this huge stairwell in front of you that goes up to the European Masters. We are in the entry point to the largest museum in the Americas. And our first barrier is just knowing which way to turn. I feel like there are a lot of people who like, enter this great hall (chuckle), well, is this the Great Hall? No, this isn’t the Great Hall. 

Patrick Bringley
This is the Great Hall. Yes.

Lilah Raptopoulos
This is the Great Hall. We were in the Great Hall. It is this, like, classical, gorgeous temple feeling thing. I feel like I’m in the Acropolis, and I feel like a lot of people come in and get pretty tired even just looking around, like they’re pretty overwhelmed about where they start. Like, you’re not going from the beginning of time to the end of time when you walk around. You could be going from medieval to modern or what, it, like, what advice do you give people who are walking in to a museum this big and this important just when they’re starting? 

Patrick Bringley
No, it’s very true what you said. People walk in here. It’s not clear where you’re supposed to go. The Met is a not a linear place. So my advice to them is, first, just get lost. Get your admission ticket, start wandering. Don’t bother to read all the labels. Just get a sense of how vast this place is because there’s time later. There’s time later for saying, OK, now that I have a little bit of sense of what we’re dealing with, I just want to focus on the 19th century paintings or I just want to focus on Cypriot art or whatever the case may be. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. OK. Where are we going? I’m following your lead. 

Patrick Bringley
I don’t know. Wanna go on to Greece? (Inaudible)

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yes, let’s go to Greece. I’m Greek, so let’s go to Greece. (Laughter)

Patrick Bringley
Hey, look at that! Of course. Of course, the name. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
We turn left from the Great Hall. We walk right into Greece. We go through a barrel-vaulted gallery, past large marble statues of warriors and gods, past terracotta vases. And as we walk, Patrick stops me to point at a kind of stain on the wall. I never would have noticed it without him. 

Patrick Bringley
So, yes, we are heading into, in my day, this was Section K-1. If you get sent to Section K-1, one of the first things you’re gonna notice is these floors which are made of marble, which are not good to stand on over the course of an 8-or-12-hour day. There are parts of the wall that are sort of cloudy with a dark mark, and this is what we call in the trade a guard mark. This is from 100-plus years of guards leaning against this particular stone. That’s all from the polyester, the paint from our polyester suits, the dye, whatever it is. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Wow. Wait, that’s amazing. So on, if you, if you’re in a museum and you see a stone wall with a marking about hip height . . . 

Patrick Bringley
Yes, about hip-high. You know, that’s to try to save those feet from these stone floors. (Lilah laughs) What’s interesting here, too, you know, we’re walking through a gallery of, you know, these white statues. But of course, you know, as you all know, being Greek, that an ancient walking through here would be puzzled by what he’s seeing, because he’d say, well, when are you gonna paint all this stuff? 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, they were painted like very colourful . . . 

Patrick Bringley
Yeah. Yeah. I had a professor who said, you know, the Greeks were very gaudy people. If they had neon lights, they would have strung them on the Parthenon. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
So it was like a Vegas? (Laughter)

Patrick Bringley
Yeah. Yeah. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
You know, sometimes you walk into a museum, if you don’t go that often or you’re on vacation or something, and you’re with someone who probably didn’t want to go (laughter) and, you know, you want to, like, do the Met or do MoMA or do the Philly Museum of Art or whatever it is, you’re seeing things, but you’re also not stopping. And now we’re three, start to get tired and hungry and cranky and you leave and you didn’t know the context for a lot of the things you saw and you just feel like maybe I’m not a museum person. I feel like there could be small ways to just sort of like shift that mindset or change it. And I’m curious what you think. Like, how do you do that? 

Patrick Bringley
One thing I do recommend is try going alone. I mean, obviously it’s hard if you are travelling with people, but your own home city, even if you think you’re not an art person, go to the museum alone because that will allow you to figure out for yourself in the kind of quiet way, what do I actually like here? What do I value? Right now, you and I are walking through the medieval arts and we’re just talking about things that has nothing to do with medieval art. So as a result, we are not sort of penetrated by this stuff. But if you and I just split off from each other and I said, Go look at this stuff for 15 minutes and I’ll look at this for 15 minutes, you kind of, your soul can quiet down and you can begin to be penetrated by it. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Yeah. That’s really good advice. 

Patrick Bringley
All right. We can go to our different sections. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Sounds great. 

The next place Patrick wants to bring me as we learn how to experience museums better is the newest building in the Met, the Robert Lehman Wing. We walk together into one of the country’s most extraordinary donated private art collections. It has works that span 700 years. 

Patrick Bringley
I mean, Robert Lehman, they sort of have tried to recreate his townhouse and this is a good place to go if you don’t want to feel overwhelmed. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. It’s so much quieter and like . . . 

Patrick Bringley
It’s quiet. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
You can probably even hear it in the tape. 

Patrick Bringley
Exactly. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Patrick wants to show me a few late-Gothic, early-Renaissance paintings of the life of Christ. Once when he was a guard, he overheard a visitor call these religious paintings the Jesus pictures. And I’ve personally never quite known how to appreciate the Jesus pictures. But Patrick loves the Jesus pictures, and I want to know why. 

Patrick Bringley
I got to say that, you know, I am not a Christian, but I really adore these pictures. I mean, if you know anything about the 14th century, you know that was a hard walk century. I mean, maybe a third of Europe died in the bubonic plague. Some people see this stuff, and I think they’re conditioned to view it as very alien, you know, very, you know, it doesn’t, you know, maybe churchy, it kind of makes them . . . they have associations that is something dry about it. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Or it’s like same, you know, same story over and over again. 

Patrick Bringley
That’s right. Whereas . . . but I mean, the emotion, though, is so close to the surface. I mean, how could it not be as they are living through this catastrophic age and they are painting these scenes of the Passion, which is just an old word that means suffering. And it seems like they just took a huge range of human emotion and poured it into this one story of this 1st-century man from Judea who lived a short, hard life with a horrific end. And here you and I are looking at an adoration and a lamentation. And to me, I find this very moving because my experience with my brother and with spending all that time in hospital rooms and by bedside, which I’m sure everyone has done in one sense or another, your heart kind of brims at the same time as it breaks. It’s very sad, but it’s also very beautiful. You lament and you adore. It, kind of, you move back and forth between these states. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm. 

[MUSIC PLAYING]

This really does feel like a townhouse. (Laughter) 

Patrick Bringley
Yeah, it’s cool, right? 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Really nice townhouse. 

Patrick Bringley
I know. (Lilah laughs) It is very nice. There’s also, if you go to the other side through it, there’s a very comfy couch. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK. 

Patrick Bringley
Go sit down on a break or something. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Patrick and I keep going. We walk out of the quiet Lehman collection and we walk towards the stairs up to the 19th- and early-20th-century European paintings. 

It’s amazing how much, how the sound, I mean, even just looking at my recorder, how much the sound changes between different, like, parts of this museum. 

Patrick Bringley
One thing you learn as a guard, which is very interesting, is that the way things are lighted determine how loud it is. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Really? 

Patrick Bringley
100 per cent.

Lilah Raptopoulos
What do you mean? 

Patrick Bringley
So if you go into the Asian galleries, they’re very dark. And as a result, everybody whispers (Lilah laughs) because they feel as if, I don’t know . . . like when you’re in a dark place, it’s probably something in our evolution that doesn’t want to, you know, scare the tiger that might kill us or I don’t know what the case is, but they’ll walk through the door and immediately start whispering. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Wow. 

Patrick Bringley
Whereas if you’re in galleries like this, we’re walking through a quite a somewhat bright gallery and it just feels like a bowling alley to people. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
(Laughter) Totally. 

Patrick Bringley
They just, you know, they just talk however they will. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, like, you’re less reverent in some way. 

Patrick and I make it to the Impressionist and post-Impressionist art. This is one of the busiest wings of the Met. It’s full of huge, lush, world-famous paintings. 

Patrick Bringley
So, yeah, we’ve walked into the 19th-century European paintings. As you can see, it’s gotten much busier. This is a very popular place to be. You know, we’re by Renoirs and Monets and Van Goghs and Degas over here. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
I think if you don’t know a lot about art, you can think of it as pretentious or it can make you feel dumb (laughter) and you can walk through a museum and think, oh, that’s “Starry Night”, I know “Starry Night”. And then you can think, oh, I don’t know this artist, so I don’t know how to access it. I wonder, like, what a good, you know, we say this as we enter a room of some of Monet’s most famous paintings. But I wonder if, like, if we stand in front of a painting, like, how do you just kind of, like, let yourself see and feel and not get stuck in what you know or what you don’t know? Just kind of like let a painting open up to you. 

Patrick Bringley
You have to want to do that, right? I mean, Monet is a great example because I think that for a while my home section was the Old Masters, and I sort of was a little bit dismissive of Monet because you think of him as very pretty, is on all sorts of postcards and calendars. But then I spent more time working here and you say, OK, let’s just open myself up to it and start looking at the pictures. And when you do, he’s such a great painter and he’s a great painter not because of, you know, some reason an art historian said. It’s because there is much to feed on. I mean, this is a late Monet that we’re looking at, a “Water Lilies” that is sort of wild. It’s kind of has these broad gestures, like an old man painted it, and he was an old man who painted it, who at that time was not worried about making things particularly pretty, was not having, like, the most controlled strokes. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, it’s like kind of, it’s dark. It’s darker than a lot of his other paintings. It’s like very . . . I don’t know the words. This is like describing wine. It’s, like, gestural. (Laughter) 

Patrick Bringley
Yeah. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
It’s like sort of, big sort of strokes that seems like hasty or in a way. I don’t know why. 

Patrick Bringley
Yes, It sort of reminds you of the quality of the world when you’re looking at it and you notice all the details that, you know, if you and I look around us in this room, we’re in a room with dozens of people, and every one of these people is wearing clothes and making gestures. And then there’s also this light that is bouncing off them in different ways. And this floor is worn in an interesting way. And like, if we were to actually absorb that, you know, we just would almost be struck dumb trying to wrap our minds around it. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. 

Patrick Bringley
And oftentimes, Monet paintings and Impressionist paintings are essentially trying to put that feeling on to the canvas. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. 

Patrick Bringley
Like really being like, wow, I’m gonna really look at what these waves look like and I’m not gonna try to make it look like a photograph. I’m gonna try to make it look like the movement of reality that’s happening in this room right now. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. Look like how it feels. 

Patrick Bringley
Look like how it . . . Yes. And I mean, when he does that well, which he doesn’t always, but sometimes he just nails it, you’re just like, whew, man, that is, that is, that’s something else. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Do you have any, like, rules for looking at art? (Chuckle) Do you have any advice that you give people as they’re trying to figure out what they like? 

Patrick Bringley
Yes. So I think the first, your first responsibility is to do nothing. And it’s very hard. But if, you know, we’ve just walked into the Van Gogh paintings, everyone knows something about Van Gogh and maybe you’ve decided you like it, maybe you decided you haven’t. But I really think, for art to do its work, you spend some time looking at it and being like, I’m not letting my ideas get in between me and the picture. I’m not letting my first impression be the only impression. I want to spend time looking at the details of this thing, looking at the wholeness of this thing, looking at, then start paying attention to how you feel. If you feel anything at all, you’re not out to decide whether this is a good painting or a great painting or a terrible painting. First, decide, like, does this do anything to me? 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. 

Patrick Bringley
And then my next rule would to be go away and look at other things and learn something and then return, you know, return, keep returning. Like, don’t ever totally make up your mind about these things. You know, if you’ve decided Van Gogh isn’t your taste, that’s fine. But also, like, there’s reasons why people think he’s a great painter probably. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. (Laughter) Yeah.

Patrick Bringley
So isn’t it worth it to . . . isn’t it worth it to continue to look and see if you can extract some of that? And maybe you never will. And that’s fine too. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, yeah. 

[MUSIC PLAYING]

At the end of our tour, I find a quiet room to ask Patrick one last question. I read one of my favourite quotes from his book back to him. In the scene from the, quote, “he’s standing in a gallery as a guard. He’s just watched a businessman finished what seemed like a very urgent call.” And he writes this. He writes, “I ponder what a rare set of duties I have for the modern world. Unlike most people, I have no ball to push forward, no project to advance, no future I am building toward. I could work at this job for 30 years and I will have made no progress per se, and I find myself happy to be going nowhere. ”

And I just, like, I’d love to hear your reflections on this, that time you spent here. 

Patrick Bringley
I do feel like when I got to come here every day and be a guard, which means that all I need to do is keep my hands empty and my head up and I’m doing a perfect job, it allowed me a kind of incredible freedom in my thinking to move in different directions, not just forward, but different directions. I would even play a little game sometimes to just see what would happen. I would look at people and I would say, well, why don’t I try to have the same kind of sympathy for them that I might have to this person in that picture there. I look at that portrait and I think, oh my God, isn’t it amazing? You know, there is a person that Van Gogh painted 100-some years ago, and isn’t there something so lovely about her? And she’s an older woman. And you’re like, look around in the room and you’re like, oh, well, there’s one of those right over there. (Lilah laughs) Like, what would it feel like if I kind of look at her like she’s a painting? And then what if I looked at these paintings a little bit like they were people that, you know, run the deli in my neighbourhood or whatever. You can just kind of, I don’t know, keep trying to find angles like that. Keep trying to see what it is that . . . what centres of your brain can be lit up by this stuff? What allows your path to move to create interesting thoughts? 

Lilah Raptopoulos
It’s been two hours, so it’s time to let Patrick go. We walk out of the museum together back the way we came — through medieval, through ancient Greece, through the Great Hall and at the entrance. As we walk, Patrick is waving and chatting and fistbumping with the guards we pass. They are his former colleagues and when we say goodbye on the steps, he and the guard that’s manning the front door slap hands. The guard then looks at me and looks down at my recorder. 

Patrick Bringley
What’s up, man? 

Unidentified Met guard
Whatever he says, don’t listen. It’s not true.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Oh, don’t believe it. OK. (Laughter) 

Unidentified Met guard
It’s all made up. (Laughter)

Lilah Raptopoulos
(Inaudible overlapping speech and laughter) 

Patrick, thank you so much. This is wonderful. 

Patrick Bringley
Lilah, it’s been such a pleasure. Thank you. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Thank you. 

[MUSIC PLAYING]

That’s the show this week. Thank you for listening to FT Weekend, the Life and Arts podcast of the Financial Times. Next week I hope to see some of you at the FT Weekend Festival. It is in London at Kenwood House on Saturday, September 2nd. I will be there. I’m hosting a panel about the booming genre of food memoir. I’m doing a cooking demo of Chinese cooking with my colleague Fuchsia Dunlop. There are also a ton of other panels and guests. There’s Succession creator Jesse Armstrong. There’s the artist Cornelia Parker, the author Leila Slimani, and of course, my incredible colleagues, who you hear every week on the show. We have links and a special discount for you in the show notes. 

As you know, we love hearing from you. The show is on Twitter @ftweekendpod, and I am on Instagram and Twitter, but mostly talking to you on Instagram @lilahrap. I am Lilah Raptopoulos and here’s my talented team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smyth is our producer. Molly Nugent is our contributing producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco, with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer. Monique Mulima is our intern and our global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Special shout out this week to Molly Nugent. 

Have a wonderful weekend and we’ll find each other again and maybe see each other next week.