The difference between ambling and sauntering

Let's talk about The Gates: the big new public arty thingy at Central Park: 7500 orange nylon sheets that snake along 23 miles of public pathways and erected for $20 million. A New York Times article ("In a Saffron Ribbon, a Billowy Gift to the City," by Michael Kimmelman, published February 13, 2005) takes pains to let us know that this project was a gift to the city, both in psychic and economic terms. The artist-benefactors, an aging couple named Christo and Jeanne-Claude, footed the bill, although we don't learn just where they got this kind of cash. Maybe they sold their last names. Mr. Kimmelman instructs readers of his article to appreciate the proletarian grandeur of this privately-financed gem. He calls The Gates, which look to me like nothing so much as an endless car wash for 18-wheelers, "a work of pure joy, a vast populist spectacle of good will and simple eloquence, the first great public art event of the 21st century. " It is, he says, the product of Christo's lifelong dedication to art for the Everyman, based in his dedication to the utopian ideals of Socialist Realism. Perhaps it is a nod to the evanescence of such utopias that this great Nylon Curtain will be swept away after 16 days.

So, what's my problem with this? Let me quote the article's author here for a moment: "It's useful to recall that Christo conceived of 'The Gates' 26 years ago, when Central Park was in abominable shape." That is as far as Mr. Kimmelman chooses to tread on that path, and I would suspect that's not by accident. Were he to reminisce about just what was wrong with Central Park (and the rest of New York) 26 years ago, it might have led to a close brush with one or more unsavory reminders of the days when populism implied, at the VERY least, a well-practiced tolerance and sympathy for the smelly human casualties of an inegalitarian economic system. Today, terms such as populism and even socialist realism have been denatured--rendered safe for public consumption through an intricate filtering process, strained through the pages of the New York Times to preserve their blue-state tint even as they're stripped of all economic content. The industrial orange color of The Gates might recall the nobility of such blue-collar activities as garbage collection and road construction, but it is important to recall that Central Park was made safe for The Gates by a distinctly anti-populist, anti-socialist campaign waged against the city's poorest and most vulnerable citizens.*

Mr. Kimmelman states that Christo and Jeanne-Claude keep faith with the park's architects by highlighting "the ingenious and whimsical curves, dips and loops that Olmsted and Vaux devised as antidotes to the rigid grid plan of the surrounding city streets and, by extension, to the general hardships of urban life." He also revels in the observation that whereas Central Park pedestrians used to amble, now they can saunter. I think it's important to keep in mind whose "general hardships of urban life" are being cured by whimsical paths and 23 miles of fluttering plastic, and whose mere presence has been criminalized. Who ambles, who saunters? Not having witnessed The Gates myself, I shouldn't really critique it for its aesthetic qualities, but I am pissed off by Christo's, Jeanne-Claude's, and (especially) Mr. Kimmelman's collusion in the counterfeiting of an egalitarian vision.

*Here's a perspective on former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's anti-homeless-people crusade, written by a Greenwich Village artist: http://www.openair.org/alerts/artist/nyhl.html