Baudacious

Will Baude gives a short appraisal of The Gates and focuses on the work's civic context:

Incidentally, I am pleased that Christo decided to spend his own money on this flight of fancy rather than to collect rents from the citizens of New York. Still, it would have been nicer if he had not been given the massive, massive subsidy of 2 weeks free rent in Central Park.

In Christo and Jeanne-Claude's defense, I think this falls somewhere between inaccuracy and mischaracterization. We can't know for sure because the breakdown for the tab for The Gates has not been disclosed, but as Greg Allen notes in his estimation of the bill, C&J-C paid to play:

C&J-C will also pay for NYPD to patrol the park and for Gates-related expenses of the Parks Dept. & CP Conservancy. I used $500,000, or half of the Conservancy's $1mm/month on maintenance and operations budget for the entire park, as a plug. Other expenses include: liability insurance indemnifying the City and the Conservancy and a restoration bond to ensure the Park is returned to its pre-Gates state.

There are intangibles, of course, associated with the most prominent park real estate in the world, but then the millions of visitors that The Gates lured seems to add up to repayment with interest. More interesting is Baude's speculation about speech implications for Central Park:

I think New York City may be opening itself up to some First Amendment claims, if it refuses to grant use of the park to the next public artist who wishes to use the park for some megalomaniacal megaproject. To be sure, since Christo used only his own money for this, the number of other people willing to spend 30 million dollars to drape the park with flags may be small, but because Christo used only his own money, the city would be particularly hard pressed to argue that this was not private speech but government speech.

And since it has opened up a public forum (parks are traditional public fora, and Central Park is the ultimate park) for one speaker, it will have a hard time explaining why it won't open up the same park to later speakers who want to make similar use of it. This means that when the neo-Nazis wish to drape Central Park in swastikas, when NARAL wishes to drape the park with pro-choice propaganda, when I wish to drape the park with ads to come visit Crescat, the city will be hard pressed to explain why we cannot, so long as we are willing to do so on our own dollar.

He concludes that there likely exist applicable caveats that would cover NYC. I'm hardly interested in a footnoted legal debate with Will Baude, but Wendy Steiner's The Scandal of Pleasure might proffer an account of how it could go down. In her survey of the arts theatre of the 80s/90s culture wars, Steiner documents a few significant cases on visual art and speech, specifically the catalytic Mapplethorpe obscenity trial and National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley. If you recognize the artists in those titles—photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and performance artists Karen Finley—and know that former Senator Jesse Helms was involved, you could probably guess that these cases involve the suppression of speech. That's not what Baude's discussing, really; but in the Mapplethorpe trial (and to a lesser extent, NEA v. Finley) the prosecution attempted to reclassify art as pornography, and the defense was tasked with proving to a jury (or Court) that art was, in fact, art. From my uninformed perspective, it seems to me that the bureaucratic mess that would ensue from a corporation or political party demanding the access to Central Park enjoyed by Christo and Jeanne-Claude could spiral into a thorny, mitigating evaluation of what makes The Gates art, why they represent a distinct sort of speech from even materially similar banners featuring corporate or politically disfavored speech, and why the city has an interest in promoting the former while denying the latter in a way that is consistent with the First Amendment.

UPDATE: Of course—if this unlikely hypothetical ever came to pass, the faux-gates would probably just be relegated to the same bureaucratic pigeonhole that The Gates were tucked into for 30 years. I don't mean to suggest otherwise. As Wendy Steiner describes in Scandal (which I highly recommend, if I didn't say so above), it's under unusual circumstances that controversial art comes to the attention of those who are willing to cry foul and also have the political authority to do something about it. There are far fewer family watchdog groups patrolling the nation's biennials than you might imagine, and most people don't seem to react so viscerally to controversial art. (In many genres; recall the revelation, for example, that a lone activist group, the Parents Television Council, was responsible for 99 percent of television content complaints made to the FCC.) Only by odd routes did Piss Christ enter Jesse Helms's sphere of attention, opening the floodgates to popular conservative criticism of contemporary art. I halfway expected a fury to follow Andrea Fraser's Untitled (warning: link features thumbnail images of nude, mating humans), but it never arrived, ostensibly because no one who saw it ever telephoned Senator Santorum. Or, for that matter, Catherine MacKinnon. I guess everyone has bigger fish to fry.

Posted by Kriston at February 28, 2005 6:11 PM