Berkeley Art Museum

The guard said not to take pictures of the art, after he'd taken a series of shots of Ray Johnson's famous envelopes, and he complied, asking if it would be all-right to take pictures of the architecture of the building.

Yes, that would ok the guard said.

The guard followed him from floor to floor, from Warhol's Poloroids up to the Buddhas, on up to the survey of 60's and 70's west coast art (Baldesarri, Rushca, Burden, and Paul Kos among many others). It was there that he asked her if she liked working here. "It's ok," she said.

The guard was a young woman with black hair, Vietnamese perhaps.

Soon he and the guard  drifted apart. He'd been obedient as far as she could see and trusted him not to take pictures of the art.

At last he came to the bottom level of the museum. There in the gallery titled "Abstract Expressionism," there's a small Pollock. The guard was out of sight and he was tempted to take a picture of the painting, but he didn't. Instead he thought how strange it is to look at pictures hanging on a concrete wall, made by artists who make paintings to be looked at by people like himself.