“Unveiling Hidden Depths: How Patrick Bringley’s ‘All the Beauty in the World’ Transforms Everyday Life into Extraordinary Art”
Tom takes his last breath in All The Beauty in the World, and I found that awe-inspiring, much as I tend to be enraptured by art. Ironically, the word, inspire, means to ‘breathe in.’
“For years,” Bringley writes, “I had noticed the men and women who worked inside New York’s great art museum. Not the curators hidden away in offices—the guards standing watchfully in every corner. Might I join them?” He dared to drop out of the forward-marching world and spend all day absorbing and gleaning from the artistic masters of the past. In the fall of 2008, he took up his post at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He is fitted with a blue suit, which is custom-designed, and dry-cleaned frequently. He’s given orientation and training, a probation period. Special shoes and a sock allowance come with the gig. Concrete floors are less favorable than the cushier wood floors. Each section of The Met is referred to as a letter. C [the Great Hall] and J [Contemporary Art] and the Egyptian Wing is H. I’m starting to see the elegant formula to organization, perhaps it’s a bit like bio math, which Bringley’s brother studied, only one focused on interconnecting hallways and blocks, the two-million-square-foot treasure house that is the Metropolitan Museum of Art, instead of arteries and organs and the 60,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body, that perhaps math and art are in more conversation than we give credit.
