Fake Plastic Trees

I was in New York over the weekend and spent a crisp Saturday afternoon with SueAndNotU in Central Park seeing The Gates. Pictures are below the cut. I think Christo and Jeanne-Claude did a nice job of transforming the place—that transformation accomplished as much by the scores of people talking about The Gates as the gates themselves—and in that sense, I think it's a fine piece. Nodody but Christo gets scores of people swarming a park and buzzing about the limits and purposes of contemporary art . The Gates put Gates-goers in a convivial spirit even if some of them disliked the work; walking the park made for excellent art-related eavesdropping—let's hope we see some choice cuts on Overheard in NY.

I'm not sold that The Gates is a great artwork or even among the better half of C&J-C's public projects. (The Gates haven't killed anybody so far, so it's definitely not their worst. I know, cheap shot.) Cutting through New York City's red tape is a feat, but NYC's no East Berlin; Greg Allen's speculations about the cost of the piece also helped to cool my expectations to some degree. I think the glimmer of disappointment that has marked the critical reception of The Gates is that the externalities—so critical to C&J-C's work—are either not there or not all that impressive. For comparison's sake: C&J-C needed something of a deus ex machina to get both The Gates and Reichstag off the ground, but, with all due respect to Mayor Bloomberg, his election wasn't exactly the fall of the Iron Curtain. It's no one's fault that the piece isn't more dramatic than it is, but I think that a proper evaluation of extremely social, public art invites an assessment of those social factors that make the art work in the first place.

But! since I'm a total sissy, by the time I left I had fallen completely in love with The Gates. As Susan and I were leaving, we saw a man stepping onto the trail, swinging two little tots in tow. He was explaining to them (in Dad-voice), "This is your only chance ever to see this art—the orange gates will never be back here again. But you can always remember that you saw Christo's artwork when you were little kids!" and the kids were all "WOW!"—and I melted like the gooey butterball that I am. Susan proceeded to mock me for going all schmaltzy democratization-of-art on her, demanding to know where her proper liberal elitist boyfriend had disappeared to. Enjoying art with the people, Sue, with the people!

Susan is the shutterbug in our relationship, but every once in a while I'll catch her in the rare moment when she's not actively despising the aesthetics of the proletariat.

I checked out of my Williamsburg on Sunday, and the large duffel bag I was forced to haul around Manhattan around prevented me from getting up to the roof of the Met (or anywhere else) for the bird's-eye view, but I'm sure they can be found online.