The Gates - Central Park, NYC

Just what you need - another opinion of "The Gates." Oh well, hey I didn't force you to read this. I went last Saturday, a very cold, but still sunny day, late in the afternoon. The park was more crowded than I've ever seen it -- even more than in summer. It was strange to see all of these people, bundled up in big coats and hats, walking around the park. Everyone was silent -- like they were in a library or museum, which added to the strangeness. It was definitely all about a (capital-A) Art Event.

I was really looking forward to going -- big public art things in New York are rarely so "de rigeur." You know, I thought it was really, well, interesting. I could blather on affectedly about how it reconfigured a familiar public place into something different, how it re-contextualized the natural and familiar elements of the park -- but I won't --oh wait. i just did.

My only issues with it were mainly,--well first, sadly, the color. I know that Christo and Jean Claude call it "saffron" and I'm sure they chose that color because it made the structures stand out strongly against the grays and browns of the park in winter, but if you live in NYC, that color means one thing, "Construction." It was the same color as that little plastic fencing material that they cover job sites with, the color of orange traffic cones, the color of "Sidewalk closed -- Use other side." For me, it transformed the piece into something a little too pedestrian. It should have been strange and astonishing -- not reminiscent of plastic Jersey barriers near the toll booth at the Holland Tunnel. Couldn't they have made the damn things blue or something??

The other problem is just in the nature of the installation. You KNOW it's huge, stretching for miles around the park, but it's hard to find a spot where you can see a lot of the structures in one place. The park is hilly and full of trees -- usually a very good thing, but it seemed like you could only see the few gates coming up ahead at any given time, I got no sense of the scale of the thing. I was hoping that I'd see orange (well, blue) stretching out before me, like a weird cloud, or lines of orange going into infinity. You just didn't get that, at least where I walked.

Of course, it's easier to complain than to approve, and there was a lot about it that I really liked. It has a certain strangeness to it. You can't avoid the whole question of "Why?" Why do this? Why expend the effort? It's interesting, and has people jabbering "for" or "against" all over the city. I also like the way it turns Central Park into "Bizarro-world Central Park," like the trees and rocks have retreated shamefully, allowing these weird orange curtains to take the stage, Best of all, I loved the way it made yuppie couples feel like patrons of the arts. Art that does that can't be bad.