When I was a kid, my parents would park me in our local museum — the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston — on Saturday and let me wander, which I liked to do. So I got to absorb a big art collection in a sociable, stroll-by way.


There was my good pal Paul Revere (in John Singleton Copley’s painting). And Ganesha with his goddess playmates, Success and Prosperity, perched on his knees. And the Virgin and Child uncomplainingly sitting, in Rogier van der Weyden’s altarpiece, for a fussy St. Luke as he works on their portraits.


My guess is that this slow immersion gave me some early sense of the interconnections and equivalence of cultures, all kinds. Maybe that’s why no art has ever really felt foreign to me, which doesn’t mean that a lot of it isn’t mysterious.


These days the Brooklyn Museum is offering its own art immersion experience, fast and condensed in a 21st-century way, in “Connecting Cultures: A World in Brooklyn,” a new long-term installation in the Great Hall, near the museum’s front entrance.


The 300 or so objects on view are all from the museum’s old, vast and deeply intriguing collection. As a group, they’re eclectic for sure, but this is by no means second-rank stuff. Some of the museum’s signature items are in the mix.


Its grand 18th-century painting of the Virgin of Cocharcas from colonial Peru is here. So is its broken-nosed but ineffably smiling female sphinx’s head from Middle Kingdom Egypt. A 19th-century Northwest Coast dance mask in the form of a whale, with movable flippers and jaws, is a treat in itself, and a magnetic reminder of the museum’s fabled American Indian holdings.


For decades the Great Hall was dedicated to American Indian art, with monumental sculptures grouped in its high-ceilinged center and pre-Columbian textiles and pots scattered around the sides. But the space never worked. Its parameters were vague, its sightlines blighted by clunky pillars. All together it made for a damp introduction to the galleries beyond and above.


In an effort to work up fizz, the museum has been experimenting with the architecture. The latest change is the addition of four temporary partitions that transform much of the hall from a special blob to a foursquare white box, a box that’s been filled to the max.


There’s so much in it that the initial effect is a bit swamping, as if you’d entered a high-end sundries shop.


But in a sense, that’s the point: to shake up the usual one-culture-per-gallery museum format and get you shopping, with your magpie eye sharpened for odd and tasty things. And there are plenty of those, including — to name but two — a Melanesian “leaf spirit” mask made from bark cloth as sheer as a spider’s web and a 1935 deli meat slicer that doubles as abstract sculpture.


As it turns out, the installation does have a structure, a simple one, built around three broad themes: people, places and things. In most cultures the human figure is omnipresent but rarely merely human, and that’s true here.


Gaston Lachaise’s “Standing Woman” is Superwoman. The two silk-screened figures in Michelangelo Pistoletto’s mirror-surfaced “Standing Man, Standing Woman With Hat” from 1980 seem to be figments of their own imaginations. The woman in Daniel Huntington’s 1858 work “The Sketcher: A Portrait of Mlle. Rosina, a Jewess” is a studio model posed as a biblical sibyl.


And the free-standing, two-sided “Life-Death Figure,” carved from stone in Mexico some time between A.D. 900 and 1250, has multiple personalities. Seen from one side, it’s a sturdy and modish young man with pierced ears and extreme tattoos; seen from the other, it’s a claw-footed skeleton, a Dorian Gray alter ego.


Places can hide surprises too, though not so often. An 18th-century Jain diagram of the cosmos turns the universe into a kind of salvational board game. A painting by Louis Comfort Tiffany makes 19th-century Cairo look as bland as a postcard.


But an 1866 painting of Niagara Falls by another American, Louis Rémy Mignot, has an interesting back story. Mignot (1831-70) was born in South Carolina, and though he spent much of his short career in New York, during the Civil War his heart was with the Confederacy. As if to convey the increasing alienation he felt on Northern soil, when he painted Niagara, a symbol of nationalist might, he positioned himself to face Canada and kept his back to the United States.


Things, which make up the third thematic category, are what shopping is all about, though their value can be hard to determine and is never absolute. What, in the grand scheme of things, is the intrinsic value of a chair? In your living room it’s something to nod off in. In Puritan New England it was meant to keep you stiff-backed and upright. In 19th-century Ghana, it was more symbol, barely furniture. Its presence in the home of an Asante chief broadcast a power message: the chief, if he chose, could sit, but you, his subject, must stand.