On the Metropolitan Museum of Art

and the two faces of desire

One of my favorite children’s books growing up, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, tells the story of a young Connecticut teenager, Claudia Kincaid, who runs away with her brother to live at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Like nearly everyone else I know who read E.L. Konigsburg’s novel at a formative age, Claudia’s fantasy became my own. I too (I decided) would run off to sleep in one of the Elizabeth canopy bedrooms, stow my luggage in a sarcophagus, and fund my Automat meals—the book was written in 1967—with coins picked up from the bottom of the restaurant fountain: since lost to renovation.

I do not, alas, live at the Met. But I do spend more time there than anywhere else in the city that is not my own apartment. Four days a week—the museum is closed on Wednesdays—I work there: clearing my administrative emails at the members’ Balcony Lounge on the second floor, then heading into more intensive research at the Watson Library, a fully-operational research library sequestered beneath the archways of the Vélez Blanco Patio. During breaks I wander. Certain routes are regular—I often stop by my favorite Venetian bedroom, from Ca’ Sagredo, near the hall of Arms and Armor; I visit and revisit the Japanese calligraphy exhibit near Astor court—other times I wander without direction or intent.

Bedroom from the Palazzo Sagredo, Venice — Public Domain image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

I have come, increasingly, to spend my free time there as well. Friday and Saturday nights, when the museum stays open until nine, I often celebrate the end of a work day with a glass of wine and an hour’s wandering. I have been doing this for three months, and I still have not been to every room. Every day I give myself an assignment: to spend time with a piece I haven’t noticed before. In this way I have befriended Imari pottery and second-odd century model houses for Chinese burials, a portrait of a young woman by Marco d’Oggiono, a friend, contemporary, and imitator of Da Vinci, a 17th century German bust of Marsyas, an 18th century lampwork glass diorama of the life of Christ. I have learned and synthesized more history—putting faces and furniture to periods—than at any time since grad school, and maybe not even then.

My walks help me think more clearly. The museum’s eclectic layout—the haphazard result of generations of donors, each with their own idiosyncratic set of interests and obsessions—fosters the kind of lateral connections so vital to creative thought: to see a Ming-era wardrobe for ceremonial robes and a Fra Angelico within ten minutes of each other, or else to explore “Damascene” inlay immediately before or after Medieval religious enamel art, is to see a century, or a technique, plucked out of easy patterns of history. Half the good ideas I’ve had lately, for fiction and nonfiction alike, have come to me while walking to, from, or more likely through the museum.

I joked to Dhananjay once that the Met has become an addiction for me, and perhaps it has. I took four days off work recently after a period of exhausting work travel, grew fractious, and discovered to my surprise that my absence from the museum had been part of the cause. Sometimes I daydream about finding new routes through the space, new rooms, or else new corners within them. I get anxious at the idea that one day I might have seen everything.

Wardrobe, China, Ming dynasty — Public Domain image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

This is not the first time I felt this way about a place. Back in 2012, when I first fell in love with The McKittrick Hotel, the bar-slash-performance-venue that hosts (inter alia) Punchdrunk’s noir phantasmagoria Sleep No More, I felt a similarly heady compulsion to return. I felt, then as now, that The McKittrick was at once a homecoming and an estrangement: that the reality I experienced there severed me from the parts of my ordinary life I had all along known I could not bear. I felt and feel this way, too, about Venice, especially during the carnival season, when every alley is so thick with beauty that the air clots. These places feel like life distilled: everything that is not eternal has been boiled away.

But there is one significant difference between those two early obsessions and this one. Tickets to Sleep No More now cost nearly $200. A trip to Venice remains a significant expense. The Met is free.‡ Even allowing for the indulgence of the $210 annual membership Dhananjay and I share—which allows me to skip ticketing lines, access the members’ lounge, and bring in guests—my near-daily trip to the Met functionally costs about $2, plus, at most, the cost of a coffee. The Met is not a tourist trap nor a for-profit venture but a public institution: one which, like so much of “fancy” high culture in New York, offers a significantly cheaper experience of genuine transcendent splendor than any of the city’s mid-range market-rate cocktail bars.

And yet, most weekdays, the Met is largely empty. There is always a seat at the library (although I’ve convinced at least one friend to join me in regularly working there); when I walk I have most of the museum’s smaller rooms to myself. At times, walking through the Met off-hours feels like I’ve wandered into a kind of parallel universe, an abandoned castle in a fairy-tale, in suspended animation until a giant’s return.

I don’t, of course, wish for the kinds of crowds I find at the Uffizi or Vatican, nor for a Watson Library too crowded for researchers to reliably be able to work there. But, as enchanting as the emptiness is, I’m struck by the fact that, in a city in constant thrall to expensive ‘immersive’ experiences, from Sleep No More to the new Luna Luna exhibit at the Shed (tickets start at $44 and go up to $100 to see the Dalí); one of the city’s best, cheapest, and, indeed, most fully immersive experiences is both cheap and underutilized. It is perfectly possible, even if you don't have a directly educational interest in art and history, to, as with Sleep No More, spend a night wandering aimlessly through overwhelming, surprising, and sometimes downright surreal evocations of eras past (even with a glass of wine or two), and meet up afterwards with friends to compare notes. (“Did you see the room with nothing but teapots?” “Did you find the secret upstairs room full of jade?” “No, but I ended up in the courtesan’s dressing-room.” “Did you know there’s a hidden art nouveau dining room in the middle of the 19th century paintings?”).

It is part of the strange irony of New York that the legacy of generations of the philanthropic class has rendered old-school high culture both more affordable than, and much less trendy than, its hipster analogue. (Compare the Metropolitan Opera, where family circle tickets often run about $35, less than your average Williamsburg black-box theatre show.) But it is, I think, also true that New York’s public spaces, and stalwart cultural institutions, rarely occupy the attention they deserve within the wider attention economy. With rare exceptions, such as high-profile exhibit openings, the Met rarely makes it on top-ten lists of things-to-do-this-week, or goes viral on social media. The first time I lived in uptown Manhattan—in my twenties, with admittedly a different mindset—I made it to the Met maybe once every couple of years, despite living within easy walking distance.

I am far from the first person to argue that we need both a robust culture of public space, and of philanthropic support (you might even call it noblesse oblige) alongside, of course, governmental and tax-payer support, to make and maintain that space. But no less necessary, I think, is a culture of appreciation for, and participation in, that public space; of treating museums and libraries and subsidized theatre and public parks and botanical gardens not as mere pleasant places to take out-of-town friends when they visit but cornerstones of our social and cultural lives, as if not more worthy of our time, attention, and dollars than, say, purely for-profit ventures like bars and restaurants. It’s a way of supporting institutions we care about. But it’s also a way of resisting the attention economy: of resisting the compulsion towards novelty or Instagrammable “Experience” or contentless cool, by which aestheticized immersion becomes something someone else can profit from. Nothing at the Met is content. None of my experiences there are second-order Experiences; none of my desires are mediated by a narrative or path created for me.

I have learned about my own desires, my own loves, precisely by experiencing the freedom the Met offers: a freedom to follow my eye or my heart, to stop where I will and move where I will and linger where I will and fall in love with what moves me. No algorithm shows me where to go next or serves me up more of the same. My desire is, for the first time in a long time, unharnessed by others’ ends.

Patio from the Castle of Vélez Blanco, Public Domain image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

I’ve spent a lot of time writing about, and often criticizing, the divinization of desire I see as symptomatic of our modern religious imaginary: where what we want is understood as the closest thing to the divine. I have written, and still believe, that it is dangerous to see our desires as authoritative. But it’s only at the Met that I have come to understand more fully why.

The natural affinities I feel at the Met, an awe not just towards beauty or craftsmanship as a whole, but towards the particular pieces that move me — not because I want to appear smart or cultured or educated (indeed, no piece at the Met offers that more or less than any other) — feel, to me, like a different, perhaps even purer, kind of desire than what I feel, say, admiring someone else’s clothing on my Instagram feed, or picking out a book Amazon has indicated to me is my kind of book, in keeping with my self-understood personal brand. The mimetic nature of desire is, if not eliminated, then at least restrained: I am encountering, in the affinities I feel, a sense of both otherness and recognition: something about the pieces I learn I love draws me in — not just someone with a predictable set of preferences.

When I’m at the Met, in other words, I can understand my desire — and my pull towards beauty — outside of the systems of mimesis, social capital, and economics, attention and otherwise, that run on, and profit by, this desire and pull. There is nothing to buy. There is nothing to consume. There is nothing to prove.

I do not claim that my felt sense is truth, of course. But it is true, that it feels different to fall in love with a painting in a museum than with an item of clothing on a rack, in the same way as it feels different to fall in love with a person as to fantasize about an ideal: be it a sexual fantasy or just a vision of the “right kind of life.” It is a desire whose object is not our own self — not a desire to be — but rather a desire for, a pull toward, something outside ourselves, something that might even expand ourself. If this is “authentic” desire — that towards which our cultural turn towards authenticity is actually tending — it is authentic, in part, because we cannot predict it; because it will shape and reshape us without our own knowledge, plan, will.

That felt distinction, in turn, makes me wonder whether our cultural divinization of desire is so powerful because it is based on truth. Certainly, there’s a strong Platonic (and Christian) tradition of understanding human beings as having a foundational desire for God — one that helps define who we really are. And it is precisely because our desires are so powerful — and so mixed up with our foundational relationship to God — that they can be so easily diverted or channeled. We can so easily be convinced, or convince ourselves, that we want things we do not actually want, that the active part of desire — falling in love with something unfamiliar and strange and wholly other — can simply be replaced with accepting, or clicking on, or buying what is presented to us as a fit object for desire by algorithms that reproduce other things we’ve liked, or people like us have liked. What we see, in those instances, is nothing but a mirror: our own selves, like Narcissus, imitating another.

It’s why, when I’m feeling depressed, and I do not know what I want or who I am or what the future will hold, the best thing I can possibly do, for an hour or afternoon, is go walk in the Met a little while, and let myself fall in love.

‡Technically, the Met is pay-what-you-wish for New York State residents as well as to researchers with a Watson Library card, which is itself free; anyone college-age or over can sign up online.

Two announcements about The Line of Beauty. The first is that we are starting a new regular series: “Points of Beauty” will be an informal regular round-up of some of the pieces I’ve fallen in love with at the Met. “Points of Beauty” doesn’t claim to highlight the best of the Met nor tell a coherent story. Rather, they’re just pieces — often lesser-known ones — that I’ve come across that I think deserve a little more attention.

The second is that we are now accepting financial support from readers for our work through the Substack platform. We plan to continue to commission guest essays from excellent writers to our regular symposia – such as our recent Symposium on the Novel – and we expect to use any financial support we receive to pay them (as we already do). We are grateful for any level of support you may wish to provide.