Procrastinators in the Park

On Sunday I transformed myself into a real live New Yorker by getting up, eating a bagel and coffee for breakfast, taking the train into the city, meeting JP and a crowd of his associates for dim sum in Chinatown, and then joining all the other people in New York who’d been meaning to get to the park to see The Gates on the last day before they were taken down.

It really was a great day for such an outing; cold enough to make me actually enjoy the hot cream cheese smeared on my chin; sunny enough to make the orange cloth of the Gates glow, and apparently Sunday is a big market day in Chinatown, so there were hordes of people spilling off the sidewalks, haggling over unidentifiable (to me), inedible (to me) desiccated sea creatures. Um, there are a LOT of Chinese people in New York, by the way. I don’t mean to take anything away from my beloved San Francisco, but New York Chinatown is a whole different ballgame from San Francisco Chinatown. In San Francisco Chinatown, you can wander through a couple of blocks and, especially if you’re a tourist, kind of imagine yourself back in the bazaar in quaint, exotic Olde Shanghai or whatever. In New York Chinatown, you can walk for block after block looking at nothing but Chinese people and Chinese writing on the signs and start to worry that you accidentally slipped through a hole in the Earth and ended up in some random neighborhood in Beijhing and how the hell are you going to find your way back. But the dim sum were good and someday I’m going to get brave and eat some of the extra weird shit.

The Gates were pretty neat. There was a ton of people in the park and in fact one of the most visually compelling parts of the Gates was looking across where sections of the path ran in parallel, and seeing the lines of people shuffle under the lines of gates. I heard some cynical types describe the color as “safety orange” or “hunter’s orange” but really the color was about as beautiful as I could ever imagine orange vinyl and nylon being. I think the common description in the press of the color as “saffron” was either clever or fortunate. It may or may not be true; I have no idea how well it matches the color of Buddhist monks’ robes, but after the very notion was out there in circulation, it was hard not to think of the Gates as saffron rather than orange, and that made a difference – instead of traffic cones and barricade lights, one thought of sunsets and airborn monks.

One of the most interesting things about the Gates is the reaction to the Gates. Or maybe, the meta-reaction to the Gates. The mere labelling of the Gates as art seems to require that people have a position on them, and that’s the part I find funny – people can feel so strongly over such low stakes. There’s pretty much no political angle; the Gates cost the taxpayers nothing at all, proceeds from all the Gates schwag they were selling goes to NYC park maintenance, they were only up for two weeks, and they were made entirely of a stuff for which there is an established recycled-materials market. Estimates from commerce types are coming in and indicate that the Gates drew in enough extra people to make a measurable difference to local businesses, but not so many people that there was bad traffic or other infrastructure strain, or even inconvenience to anyone but a few weekend runners who’d rather have Central Park a bit less crowded. So in other words, whether you want to bitch about the Gates or sing their praises, you’ve got only one thing to base it on: how they looked.

I thought they looked mostly interesting with an occasional beautiful here and there. But then again, I’m interested in anything novel, and I’m constitutionally inclined to think, “Ooh, pretty!” when I see a sunlit piece of bright orange fabric billowing in the breeze (for roughly the same reason as that kid in American Beauty got off on the windblown plastic bag). I haven’t actually talked to any real people about what they thought, but the media voices have sounded to me like either one of two opinions:

The sentiment: The Gates are art! Art is good! Yay!
The subtext: Isn’t it handy to have a monumental art installation to call attention to the fact that I like art, and am therefore cool, and I live in a city where we have monumental art installations, and I am again therefore cool.

Or

The sentiment: The Gates. Whatever.
The subtext: Isn’t it handy to have a monumental art installation to call attention to the fact that I know enough about art to be able to say what’s good and bad, and I will demonstrate it by implying without actually saying that the Gates are bad, and I am therefore cool, and I live in a city where we have monumental art installations and we are all so cool that they’re not even that big ‘a deal. Did I mention that I am cool?


What I haven’t heard is that “the Gates are a masterpiece,” or that “they fail as art because…” And I think I haven’t heard this because there is no real way to say so. More than anything else, what they are is neat-o because of their novelty; they’re beautiful if you’re the kind of person who can see them that way, but they force no particular vision on the world, they ask nothing of us except attention, and even that, they make easy. I’m inclined to look unfavorably on their detractors, because, since there’s nothing else at stake, they’ve basically defined themselves as people who, given the choice to see beauty, chose ugly instead.

I guess leaving art history behind was the right choice.