The Gates: Bonus Coverage

The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger noticed that the Gates are still up (they’re being taken down s l o w l y) and checked in with critical bonus coverage:

I saw The Gates a week ago from a window on the edge of the Park, and they looked unimpressive. This past Monday, after a doctor’s appointment near the Park, I walked over for a better look. For sure, my experience of The Gates was unusual. The event had “closed” on Sunday, but it was still up.

As happens in February, the Park was bare, cold and gray. There was some snow, the trees and pieces of green. The apartment buildings along Fifth Avenue stood as they always do in winter–immutably concrete, like the grand, drab facings of inactive hydroelectric dams. The Park was quiet and almost deserted–except for The Gates.

If one opened one’s mind just a crack, it was hard not to be touched by them, and lifted.

The Gates had dignity. They stood still, moving just a little, like the leafless trees. The trees didn’t seem to mind their brief companions. Indeed, they tamed The Gates. Like this: Across a glade, rising to the clock tower by the Metropolitan Museum, the branches of the trees broke down The Gates’ stolid rectangles into glimpsed, cracked shapes of the branches’ choosing. Many people thought The Gates were made for walking through. I thought they were made for standing and staring, turning, and staring again. Amid bleak February it was hard there in the orange-tinged Park not to feel, well, happy.

Writing in this space recently, I suggested that a world made too fast by computers and too harsh by 24-hour news more than anything needed its artists and architects to provide it with respite, rather than the emotional or visual pistol-whipping of too much recent art. I do understand that Olmsted’s Park is self-sufficient solace. But by my definition, Christo’s Gates qualified.

Even though Henninger enjoys the occasional “knee-jerk kick against hype’s fat backside” (note this glorious phrase for further use!), he found the Gates palatable:

Walking earlier this week in Central Park among the 7,500 cookie-cut “Gates” of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, my thoughts turned to Ed Banfield. Edward Banfield was a famous government professor at Harvard with zero tolerance for conventional wisdom. He was known for his unusual insights into the political and social life of cities, but in 1982 he upended the art establishment with an article in Harper’s titled, “Art Versus Collectibles: Why museums should be stuffed with fakes.” Stuffed with fakes?

Citing Picasso’s “Girl With Mandolin,” then valued at $2 million, Ed Banfield argued that nearly all of that claimed “value” was about scarcity and investment, while most of the work’s aesthetic appreciation could be had with a high-quality $850 reproduction. He proposed widely distributing the pleasure of Picasso’s painting “for only $850,” thereby giving most museums “$1,999,150 left over to purchase other sources of aesthetic satisfaction.” Needless to say, a Sistine Chapel’s worth of art-world rage fell on Banfield’s head.

Ed Banfield would have relished what has been loosed from The Gates of Central Park.

For 16 days, the masses flowed through and around Central Park’s 843 acres to see 7,500 replicates of what some called “art” and others “totalitarianism” or “defacement.” On the first weekend, 800,000 people showed up, about 790,000 more than show up at the upscale art galleries downtown on Saturday. A friend arriving from California that Sunday reported the airport aflutter with out-of-towners flying in for The Gates. Ultimately millions came.

Once out of The Gates, however, many headed for more–at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the newly upgraded Museum of Modern Art and the New York Historical Society. I assume nearly all those people thought the experience to be had in the museums was more or less the same as they’d just had among the waving saffron flaps in Central Park. How bad can this be?