Too bad that some of you folks that get to see them can’t step outside of your pinched-off and mean little perspectives for two seconds, so you can try and appreciate something intended to give you just a fleeting moment of aesthetic pleasure outside of your obviously humdrum and artless existence.
Don’t worry folks, the gates are coming down soon. Then you can go right back to enjoying your wind-drifting plastic bags, and rollerblading yuppies steering around clumps of frozen dogshit. Just like you like it.
You figure out a way to create 7500 curtained gates that can go up quickly over 23 miles, be unfurled easily and at the same time, have negligible risk of either falling over or being stolen, and have them be just as easy to remove without leaving a footprint.
I think technically, it’s quite a feat. That’s what makes most of his projects interesting. Wrapping islands? Draping a curtain across a valley?
Wow. So when I produce a painting or sculpture that someone purchases because that person likes the way it looks, or for any other reason really, that isn’t a piece of art? Or perhaps it is art, but art that has betrayed its purpose? I am not sure when I have read a more condescending, elitist, and arrogant statement. Screw you and your non-bland notions.
I really don’t see what’s so pretentious about them.
They sell drawings to raise money to pay to install sculpture.
When pressed for the project’s significance all they say, “this has no meaning. it’s just something we wanted to do, that we thought woudl be nice to look at.”
I can’t believe people are criticizing something that was paid for by private interests and feeds money into the economy. As well as being bland, politically and socially non-offensive and possibly beautiful.
I may be “culturally clueless” (and, as a result, unworthy of your consideration), but I’m quite happy that my “bland notions of taste” don’t look like anything out of Interior Desecrations.
when interviewed, that frizzy haired artist chick claimed to not care at all about what people think of their art, because artists create only for themselves. Which made me wonder why they have to crap out their version of art all over a public place without caring how the public feels about it.
If they don’t care about how people feel about it, why can’t they purchase 40 acres of wooded land somewhere and throw up their gates there?
But really, I think the gates look pretty nifty. Are they up yet? I’m trying to arrange a little vacation to NYC next month and would like to see them.
You are free to think what you like about them, i’d say. I must admit, I don’t have the advantage of seeing them in interviews, so I can’t say how they come across. The website on the project doesn’t really come across that way, but it is kinda static, so hard to tell.
The art world has, over the past half-century or so, perverted the quite correct notion that “Just because people don’t like it doesn’t mean that it isn’t Great Art” into the totally fallacious “If people don’t like it, it must be Great Art”. This explains the critical reaction to “Piss Christ” and other garbage.
On the other hand, I kinda like some of what Christo has done, including the Gates.
Granted, both he and his partner are pretentious twits, but the skirts around the Carribean islands, the curtain across the canyon, etc., are visually interesting things, and he does try not to repeat himself – he did go back to the “wrapping” well at least once too often – and at least he is spending his own money on it.
On their website, they compare their works to people’s children – people have children for their own purposes, but of course they’re thrilled if people come up and say how cute the kid is. Sounds fair to me.
They’re up. They’re coming back down on Feb. 27, so book now.
