How to Fall in Love with Museums, Even if You Hate Them – And Why You Should

The first time I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I walked past its famous Renoirs, danced to “Uptown Funk” in the American wing and became George Washington. (Well, kind of.) I read exactly zero plaques in their entirety, and I was lovingly scolded for the only one I got halfway through.

It was 6:45 on a hot Friday evening when I wandered from the hot-dog-and-pretzel-scented street up the imposing stairs of the Met, dodging the sweaty, bestickered tourists who’d flung themselves there. The museum was open late that night, and I had a date.

No, I wasn’t meeting a rando off Tindr during my solo weekend stint in New York City. Nor was I catching up with an old, relocated friend.

I was taking the VIP Met tour with Museum Hack, a company who promises culture-skipping skeptics that “museums are f***king awesome.” And although I’d been anticipating the visit for more than a month and had flown over a thousand miles to get there, I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect.

I certainly couldn’t have predicted Anna Bianco and Zak Martellucci, the hilarious pair who would serve as my first points of contact with one of the most famous and well-remarked museums in the world – and the kinds of people who describe Zeus as “hella intimidating” or scream “Fuck Van Gogh!” right in front of some of his most cherished works.

My guides irreverence isn’t an exception, but rather the rule of the Museum Hack model. The company’s founder, Nick Gray, studied not art history, but business. He admits to having once dismissed museums as incredible as the Met as “the kind of place you go when your parents are in town.” He reassessed this judgment only after a fateful date night; the evening trip to the museum hadn’t been his choice, but he left beguiled by the gallery, if not the girl. Soon, he was wandering the Met’s halls most weekends, finding, researching and falling in love with an ever-increasing list of artifacts and the fascinating secrets behind them.

Eventually, friends tagged along to learn more than what the curators’ plaques had to say about the museum’s contents. They told their friends about the offbeat tour, who told their friends… and soon, Gray had a “very full-time hobby” on his hands. He hired a single guide to keep up with demand, paying him on a per-tour basis.

Three years later, Museum Hack operates a variety of themed tours in multiple museums across four cities. The company promises to make museums un-boring by divulging the secrets – or, in the words of Bianco, the “funny, sexy, creepy” details, the “straight-up juicy gossip” – that can make art accessible and exciting, even to those who would rather be doing just about anything else.

I’ve always loved museums, so I didn’t exactly fit Gray’s original target demographic (per the website: “people who don’t like museums.”)

But even a New-Yorker-reading, perpetually-coffee-cup-holding member of the snoberati like me couldn’t help but be intrigued by what may lie hidden in such well-documented halls.

I started learning secrets before we even got started.

When I asked Martellucci how to reach the restrooms while we waited for the group to assemble, he directed me to the closest set – but then went on to inform me that there were additional, less-well-travelled toilets further off, a surefire way to skip the line. I’d need to venture up the hall, down the stairs, through a doorway and past a stowed-away clearance sign.

Upon returning from my trek, Bianco directed us to get into a “real, camp-style, toes-in” circle for a pep talk before we took off, assuring us that if we wanted a high-brow examination of the artistic merits of this renowned global collection, that was wonderful… but inviting us to “get the fuck off [her] tour.”

An hour and change later, I found myself hurrying down the stairs salvaged from the Chicago stock exchange, inundated with new information, abs sore from laughter and thoroughly lost. Bianco and Martellucci waltzed us through the dizzying, labyrinthine halls of the Met as easily as if it were their childhood home. For the coup de grace, they arranged us into the perfect, most ridiculous tableau vivant of “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” having spent two hours making us feel just silly enough that we were willing to partake in this bizarre, ersatz family portrait.

Despite their effortless knowledge of the Met, my tour guides are not rigorous art historians: Bianco is an NYU-trained actress (whose composition of an electronic song about that painting of George landed her the gig); Martellucci an ex-science educator.

But the pair know more about seemingly-innocuous artworks than seems possible, and they deliver it in a way that transcends approachability. Several times, we were told parts of the tour are designed specifically to escape the frowns – or evictions – of the eminently straight-laced guards.

Perhaps that’s why Museum Hack works so well, no matter how patrons feel about museums at the start. (The group I shared the experience with included one bona fide museum curator – and also a born-and-bred, Queens-borough New Yorker who admitted only having made the pilgrimage to the Met once before). The irreverent treatment of these glass-encased objects transforms them into relatable, tangible artifacts we can believe are the remains of actual human life.

Martellucci’s “Fuck Van Gogh!” is followed by a turn to a piece on the adjacent wall by Henri Rousseau, who, he informs us, was basically the butt of early twentieth century literati’s jokes… but who also apparently hacked the system. There it is: his work, hung in the Met, right alongside his contemporaries. Suddenly, we feel more like we belong, too, privy to this piece of behind-the-scenes knowledge.

Perhaps it’s something about feeling like an insider in a place whose academic tenor makes it feel intrinsically exclusive, despite its being fundamentally a public space. Perhaps it’s about being able to access – and understand – what you feel you have a birthright to on some level, but which simultaneously seems unfairly out of reach.

Or maybe it’s just taking off your fancy-pants, I-have-a-$50K-degree hat for a change and accessing art in a different way. Although I’m not about to trade my copies of Shakespeare for the newfangled versions composed with emojis, Bianco’s millennialism-peppered explanations didn’t garble the museum’s message. In fact, it was low-key amazing, leaving me intrigued, and informed, AF.

We saw an ancient cup depicting the Trickster Rabbit with an intimidating-looking inscription, its characters inscrutable… that is, until Bianco let us in on the joke.

Spoiler: It’s about farts.

Other quick-hit facts I learned on the tour include:

• that the Romans were not quite as good as the Greeks at the physics part of sculpting, and thus, you can discern a sculpture’s origin by looking for conposta Or, as Bianco puts it, “If it’s got a stick up its ass, it’s Roman.”
• that any piece of Greek art prominently featuring grapes (see: all of them) is delicately communicating the fact that everyone depicted is trashed.
• that the aforementioned “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” perhaps the most #America painting in existence, was actually painted by a German – and that’s not to mention the several inaccuracies in the depiction itself.

Our Easter-egg tour of the Met took us from the ridiculous (suits of armor with downright ambitious codpieces) to the revealing (a brief, not-boring history lesson on Italian Futurism, whose relevance to current political climes was disturbing enough to renew my already-abundant gladness for the included glass of plastic-stemware wine). I got chills at least five times, and I’ll put down my copy of “Infinite Jest” long enough to admit that they came a lot easier than when I go gallery-wandering alone.

My favorite moment: listening to a Sanskrit peace prayer, beautifully sung, in a room full of weapons whose glitz doesn’t diminish their deadliness. Even if you were knowledgeable enough to catch the irony of a dagger with the figure of Rumi carved into its handle, you’d miss the sheer opulence of the singer’s voice – to say nothing of the raw power of creating a beautiful, human tribute to peace in place filled with the instruments of death.

This is the favor Museum Hack lends its patrons: It translates what might easily be disregarded as sterile artifacts into living human history. With our guard lowered by colloquialisms and bad wine, we begin to understand not only the stories behind these objects, but their relevance. Our guides’ antics mean we’re not sidelining any of our attention to self-consciousness. We’re too busy having fun.

We even find we share commonalities with the long-dead creators of these artworks. After all, who hasn’t cobbled something together – like, say, an IKEA dresser – becoming more inventive in the face of mechanical failure? Though we might turn to Instagram instead of the chisel (nota bene: just as permanent), who hasn’t been at a drunken party good enough to memorialize, for better or for worse?

As Martellucci quipped while explaining the culture around an ancient sport, “People have been people as long as they have been people.”

And although it can so easily be obfuscated or misconstrued or ignored, that’s what museums are all about: the stories that we live again and again, and the collections of artifacts that let us hear them through the space of years that muffles them.

The impulse is to say something profound (or, more honestly, cheesy) – that museums, in their ability to cultivate empathy and compassion, might even change the world.

After all, it’s harder to wage war against one another – or even just ignore one another on the subway – when we understand how much we’re all fundamentally alike. When we know we’re never really alone, never the first to have any experience, be it suffering or celebration.

Or, as it turns out, fart jokes.