So how's The Gates?
In answer to my cynical question the other day -- I was wrong. It's a blast. I just came home from a tour around the southern end of the park on opening day and I've rarely been made happier by a New York event.
Jed Perl is busy agonizing about whether it's great art -- I'm sure other culturati are, too. Who knows? And, speaking as a photographer and as somebody who takes art seriously (but not solemnly) -- who cares? The point isn't The Gates -- which may or may not cast warming shadows and do all the other things the artists' statement says. The point is what's happening around The Gates. Sure, The Gates is the saffron-colored cloth -- which when you first see it looks a little like something you'd see at a construction site, but which shimmers off in the distance through the trees very nicely, thank you. But The Gates is also the crowd of visitors in the lobby of The Plaza, and on Fifth Avenue, and wandering into FAO Schwarz...
...it's the combination of saffron-colored fabric and the NYPD Deputy Commissioner for Public Information command truck at 59th and Fifth.
It's all the art types wandering around in their Daniel-Liebeskind glasses, theorizing loudly. It's the guy handing out pamphlets about Lazarus at the entrance to the Duck Pond. It's the conversations going on around you in every conceivable language. It's the guy handing you his beautiful chrome Leica M4 and asking you to take a picture of him and his girlfriend (glad to, but be careful, guy -- this is New York).
It's the pretty decent saxophonist bopping on The Mall -- blending, or not, with the helicopters and the sirens and the occasional flapping of the fabric. It's the overheard fragments... "We've got to sell them on the idea of pretension..." "I didn't just think of him as my psychiatrist, I thought of him as my friend..." "TAC 2, your ticket number is 6887..." And, over at Bethesda Fountain, where they're handing out samples of Neosporin Lip Balm, "Neosporin sounds like a disease in itself."
Over at Conservatory Water, there's a crowd gathered around the PaleMale.com telescope.
Toward the Sheep Meadow there's a miniature pinscher out in a down coat that, interestingly, matches the saffron.
And everywhere there's the crowd, watching the crowd, being the crowd...
Maybe it's the color, maybe it's the scene, but there was a throwback feel to all of this -- a window into the 60s. Interesting bit of trivia -- if I remember correctly, today is just three days past the 36th anniversary of the blizzard that ended John Lindsay's political career. I was in Central Park that day, too -- 9 years old, at a birthday party. There was no wind, and the flakes were big, and they just kept coming. Lindsay is reported to have looked at it and said, "it'll stop." He didn't order the snowplows out. It was about five days later before they dug out Queens. I'm not sure if that was the end of the "Fun City" era (which, truth be told, was always a little problematic). Might have been. If so, it'd be fitting if we got it back today.
Now, maybe I'm playing into Jed Perl's hands -- talking about the scene, and not the art, and proving that this is all "late-modern philistinism." Maybe. But I'll take it. Other art -- approvable art -- might have done many things. I'm not sure it would have made New York New York -- which is what I think The Gates managed to accomplish today. Without them this would have been a drab winter day in an empty park. With them... well, with them, New York came together and managed to turn into itself. Which, on its best days, is really what it does.
The Gates is not about The Gates. The Gates is about New York. You got a problem with that?
UPDATE: A Day 2 report here.
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