Reading notes: 'All the Beauty in the World'
It would be an indecency, a stupidity, even a betrayal to find fault with such peaceable, honest work.
By Patrick Bringley. It's a memoir of his time working as a security guard in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
- This book is very good, and easy to recommend. Besides its quality as a work memoir, its art criticism is better than most of what I consume. What he says about work I know better rings true and offers new insights. (So, for example, I now have a much better sense not only of why Titian is important but why one would be excited about his work.)
- It's a New York City book, in the best sense.
- Don't pay attention to the dust jacket or blurbs. It is the last thing many adult readers would expect, but the first thing many childred would expect: an account of why one would spend twenty thousand hours among great works of art, what that does to one's psyche, and what one learns about the art. It's totally honest but also wholesome and non-cynical.
- It's shorter than it might seem, and in fact I suspect it was padded to give it the appearance of a respectable length (there's a long, repetitive list of works that could easily have fit in a fraction of its 36 pages). To be clear, I'm very happy that the book was written at its natural length, and of all the ways to pad a book, I'm all in favor of the ones that don't dilute or diminish the main text.
- There's a self-critical account of his time at the New Yorker (e.g., delighting in introducing Stephen King to Michael Chabon without giving a thought that he's never read a book by either of them). This is just a couple pages, but is a more incisive and devastating takedown of that fragment of elite culture than most works in that crowded genre.
- I'm getting more of my aesthetic analysis (film reviews, art cricism, and so on) from this category of writer: thoughtful and educated, with deep experience, but not a traditional or credentialed critic. So, for example, many of my favorite movie reviewers are trivia buffs who have seen everything, know tons about adjacent fields, and really care about film.