in february of 2005 central park will become the latest staging ground for one of the artist christo’s massive artworks. evidently he and his partner in crime jeanne-claude have been trying to get the green light on a central park project for decades. unfortunately, even though it will be on par in scale to some of christos other works, the quality of the work strikes me as decidedly sub-par.

since becoming aware of christo i have felt a begrudging respect for his work. sure, it is basically an exercise in logistics and spectacle, but at its best his work can also be surprisingly elegant, and yes, dare i say it, even beautiful. this new piece as planned, however, is far from elegant and conceptually shoddy. evidently i am not the only one who thinks so. found this on a site called forgotten delights-

What message will The Gates convey? None at all. If you examine every fiber of the million square feet of fabric, you won’t be a nanometer closer to knowing what sort of person you’d like to be, what you should focus on, what sort of world you’d like to live in. Prominent art historians and critics at the Whitney, the Museum of Modern Art and The New York Times haven’t even tried to proclaim any meaning in The Gates. They merely assert that it will draw attention to Central Park. “It might work and it’s not permanent, so why not give it a shot?” asked the publisher of the New York Observer. The twenty-year controversy over whether to allow The Gates to be erected in Central Park was driven largely by fears of the work’s environmental impact. In fact, there’s a much more basic reason for rejecting the project: the lack of any impact on the minds of those seeing it. If it conveys no message, it isn’t art. And if it isn’t art, why allow it in the Park? We might just as well grant permission to The Picket Fences or The Discarded Taxi-Bumpers. If you want to enjoy art in Central Park, do your best to avoid Christo’s giant slalom poles. Instead, seek out the dozens of figurative sculptures scattered through the Park, from Duke Ellington to the Delacorte Clock, from the Maine Monument to Samuel Morse, from Still Hunt to the Untermeyer Fountain. Like genuine works of art ever since the caveman’s time, these have the potential to speak to you - to inspire, provoke and amuse you in a way that Christo’s Gates never will.

the author might go a little far in saying so flatly it isn’t art. i’ve long ago resigned myself to the pointlessness of the what is and what is not art argument. it’s enough to just take someone’s word that his pile of rotting fish, or his room of hard to detect smells is indeed art, just a spectacularly terrible piece of it. all subjective. aside from that little glob of bile though i agree with their approximation. it has no specific ties to the site, a site which you’d think would be rife with things to explore, and as such falls very short. it just does not have the elegance of a running fence or the “wow” of a wrapped reichstag, or the unexpectedness of a valley curtain. 

to be honest, i wish the city had not given it the green light at all. central park is one of the few places in new york you can go to escape the meaningless, ugly spectacle. central park should not be gussied up. it should not be crowded with vertical lines and orange fabric. it’s unexpected nooks and crannies should not be homogenized with 8,000 identical “gateways”. and for god sake it should not be turned into any more of a tourist attraction than it already is! instead of this cristo piece i would far prefer phony pamphlets handed out to each and every arriving visitor explaining that central park is now a biohazard and should be avoided at all cost. an even quieter, more peaceful, more secluded park… now that would be beautiful.

anyhow, to look on the bright side of (what appears to be) bad art, it’s only up for two weeks and those weeks are in the middle of february, when i will most likely be holed up in my quiet, peaceful, secluded apartment.