From the WSJ Opinion Archives
LEISURE & ARTS
It's a Wrap
Mayor Bloomberg lets Christo loose in Central Park.
NEW YORK--In some ways, Christo Javacheff is the ideal artist for the Christmas season. At least, he is the ideal artist for the Christmas season in the postmodern age. The fellow wraps things, you see. It's almost as if he were presenting a gift (the Christmas part), but it always turns out that the gift is a joke--a joke on the viewer (the postmodern part).
It's nice work if you can get it. Christo (like certain pop figures, he is known by a single name) started off in the heyday of pop art wrapping bottles and other small objects. That was in the 1960s. By the 1980s, he had graduated to wrapping bridges, buildings, even stretches of coastline.
Any Joe can wrap a couple of bottles, trot down to Chelsea, and find a gullible, or avaricious, art dealer willing to hawk 'em as art. It takes a kind of genius to wrap the Pont Neuf in Paris or the Reichstag in Berlin--not artistic genius, but genius nonetheless.
That is where Christo's wife and partner, Jeanne-Claude, comes in. She is the entrepreneurial and organizational brains of the team that identifies itself as "Christo and Jeanne-Claude." Her great triumph has been in getting her own activities baptized as an integral part of the artistic process. She haggles with French bureaucrats, it's art; she negotiates with German politicians, it's art; she pays a bill, it's art. It's one thing to tell a mere manager or businessman that his latest scheme is pure banana oil, completely ridiculous, in fact, and a public nuisance to boot. Who wants to be caught talking to an artist that way?
Christo and Jeanne-Claude make quite a team. They claim to have been born on the same day in June 1935. They live in New York now, but they met in Paris, he a refugee from Bulgaria, she "the socialite daughter of a French general," as their press releases invariably put it.
I am told that about two million people will read this newspaper. The fact that most readers will know who Christo is, will know that he wrapped the Pont Neuf and the Reichstag, is a testimony to the effectiveness of Jeanne-Claude's public-relations machine. It is formidable. One of Christo's projects involved placing thousands of 20-foot-tall umbrellas in a picturesque spot in California. When a strong wind uprooted one and it smashed into a tourist and killed her, the artist's grief at the news was somehow woven into the artwork, absolving him, in the sophisticated precincts of elite opinion, of any taint or responsibility.
Back in the early 1980s, Christo and Jeanne-Claude approached New York with the idea of planting along the walkways of Central Park some 15,000 metal gates, each with a swath of translucent saffron-colored fabric.
After a long and bitter fight, "The Gates" was defeated. The original budget for the scheme was about $5 million. Xto and J-C (the artists' logo) pay for their projects themselves, recouping the costs, and then some, through the sale of Christo's drawings and models. Still, some observers thought it obscene that the project would cost about $1 million more than the entire maintenance budget for Central Park. And why, after all, should the pair be allowed to capitalize on a public space for private profit? Then there were the environmental concerns: What would all that material do to the trees and landscaping of the park? And what about the public? Perhaps it wanted to be able to enjoy Central Park straight, unmolested by the massive intrusion of Christo's "statement."
Good luck. In 1981, when "The Gates" looked dead, Christo said, "The park is not going anywhere. . . . I intend to do this project." He knows how to bide his time. None of the original objections have really been answered. Nonetheless, earlier this month a scaled-down version of "The Gates"--7,500 gates instead of 15,000--was approved by the Central Park Conservancy. The project awaits approval by the parks department, but that is considered a done deal since Michael Bloomberg, New York's mayor, is keen on the idea. Mr. Bloomberg does not want you to smoke. He wants another hefty chunk of your income in taxes. But he plans to compensate with lots of public art. It's a 21st-century version of "Let them eat cake."
So look for Christo's latest extravaganza come February. You won't have to look hard: 7,500 saffron-colored banners will be hard to miss. The good news is that "The Gates" will be littering Central Park for only two weeks. Andy Warhol once remarked that "Art is what you can get away with." Christo shows how right he was.
Mr. Kimball is the managing editor of the New Criterion.
