Chanel Baldwin, exploring the Brooklyn Museum after learning that admission fees were “suggested.”

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

Published: August 22, 2013

CHANEL BALDWIN’S eyes sipped on that painting and only that painting, because it was what was available to her on this side of the money line.

On steaming afternoons for much of the season, Ms. Baldwin, who turned 16 on Thursday, parked herself after summer school at the Brooklyn Museum, a refugee seeking the asylum of air-conditioning.

Because she could not afford the $8 suggested student admission — one that she, like so many others, understood to be required — she never got further than the lobby. She helped herself to the bathroom and water fountain, though, and spent a lot of time gazing at the painting called “Napoleon Leading the Army Over the Alps,” by Kehinde Wiley. On Mondays and Tuesdays, when the museum was closed, she sometimes stood outside the glass doors that whispered puffs of cool air through their divide.

In a perfectly air-conditioned world, Ms. Baldwin’s art consumption might never have been. It was a boiling city that drove her into the frosty museum, and she’s not alone. In a city where culture is supposed to be king, New Yorkers in the summertime sometimes pop into a museum mostly to escape the heat. They come for the air but can grow to love the art, too.

Ms. Baldwin’s confinement to the lobby has made her something of an expert on that Napoleon painting — one of the few works hanging before the place where you pay. First she saw the obvious: A black man with Timberland boots had supplanted Napoleon in a riff on the famous painting by Jacques-Louis David. Then Ms. Baldwin saw the Starter brand wristband. Then she noticed the sperm cells swimming over the canvas. It made her wonder what the artist was trying to say about men of her race.

Ms. Baldwin could have remained at the school for chill air, but who wants to stay there a minute longer than you must? She could have gone home to her mother’s, not far away in Flatbush, but the miserly bedroom air-conditioners breathe too little into the living quarters. Here in the museum the air was different, almost lush. “It’s like when you’re getting into a pool, and they make you shower,” she said.

In the season now passing, museums in New York actively pursued people like Ms. Baldwin — potential visitors for whom liquid-cool air might have been a gateway drug to the art. On Twitter, where so many institutions speak more authentically than elsewhere, there were lures like “Beat the summer heat!” from @MuseumMileNYC, representing several institutions on Fifth Avenue. “Looking to beat the #NYC heat?” the Park Avenue Armory asked. “Beat the heat with our Store’s new Marilyn Minter water bottle & Jasper Johns beach towel,” the Guggenheim offered.

At the Museum of the Moving Image, in Queens, the chill seekers were easily detected: the ones with the soaking shirt backs, and those who sprinted in and asked the receptionist some variation of, “So what kind of museum you got here exactly?” During the heat wave, searing temperatures had driven most people from the surrounding streets, save for a crew of fluorescent-vested construction workers, belt deep in the chopped-up road, singing.

Over at the Metropolitan Museum of Art the next day, Nauman Shah, 25, was leaving French salon paintings on his way to Cypriot sculpture. For this Pakistani-born engineer, who works below earth on the Second Avenue subway project, the air-conditioning was especially important. He was observing Ramadan, the holy month of fasting for Muslims. He woke before dawn and gobbled breakfast, chased by four or five glasses of water — and then the fast. He had to conserve his hydration until 8:23 p.m. Ordinarily, he would have returned to bed, waking only for dinner. But a friend had persuaded him to go out, and they agreed on the Met over other activities, he said, in part because its cool air was almost as effective as sleep at forestalling thirst. It was aiding his monthlong quest, he said, to achieve “control over your soul and desires.”

Around this time, but in another wing, a bird, perhaps also fleeing the heat, fluttered overhead through Rooms 229 and 230. It jolted a teenage boy with a Germanic accent. He asked aloud, “Was that really a bird?”

Back at the Brooklyn Museum, Ms. Baldwin was hanging with Akeem Reuben, 16, her second cousin and another summer-school air-conditioning refugee. Ms. Baldwin was on her usual bench, where she perched because of her belief that it cost money to roam further. But the fee was only “suggested,” I told them. The cousins said no one had explained that before.

Next thing, the three of us were in line. When our turn came, I uttered the museum equivalent of “open sesame”: “No donation today, thank you.”

The gates parted. We received green tags to prove our bona fides. Ms. Baldwin and Mr. Reuben looked stunned: such a formidable barrier, so easily breached. Ms. Baldwin realized they had given her an extra admission tag. She made sure to return it.

Now what did the cousins want to see? “Statues,” Ms. Baldwin replied.

But she never made it there, because the first room set her alight and held her rapt until she had to leave. There was no label too tedious to read, no piece undeserving of her scrutiny. She couldn’t help touching some of the works.

“Look at the detail on it,” she said of a Fred Wilson mirror, gasping. Then over to a grid of shelves with dozens of jugs from around the world. Each column of jugs had a Rolodex-like set of descriptions. She and Mr. Reuben stood there and went through every last jug — reading the card, then looking up at the corresponding piece, then the next and the next. They had time.

A piece called “Avarice,” by Fernando Mastrangelo, gripped Ms. Baldwin. It appeared from afar like a classic Aztec sun stone. But she got up close. Traced her fingers over it. Went to one side, looked at it; went to the other side, considered it that way. She noticed that the piece was made of corn, and then detected a toothpaste tube, soda bottles and cowboy hats lurking on the surface, all crackling with meaning.

Watching her, I realized how the inadvertent exclusion from these rooms must have trained her eyes. Instead of cruising across many floors, she had stared at the Napoleon painting and a nearby sculpture until they had little to give. Having only them to consider had taught her how to see. Now her sight could be marshaled against anything.

But she was irritated with the museum. New York is run on the kinds of understandings that kept the cousins in the lobby, with so many places formally open to anyone but protected in their exclusivity by invisible psychic gates.

Ms. Baldwin suggested a more honest approach, since people tend to think you have to pay: “They should just put a sign out telling us that it’s somewhat free.” Either way, she pledged to inform all her friends.

As the cousins left the museum for the oven of the outdoors, two schoolmates crossed their path, heading inside. “What’s going on here?” one asked. It was the cousins’ first occasion to share their discovery.