Keith Olbermann
I'm not wild about Saffron
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They're uglier than I thought.
"The Gates" — the artist Christo's long-planned installation of 7500 orange portals in Central Park here — are now complete. They, as The New York Times put it, "blossomed today," as rectangles of similarly-hued fabric were draped from each of the gates that sit astride all of the park's 23 miles of pedestrian walkways.
They look like crap.
The great thing about being an artist, of course, is that you can call anything you make — from $21,000,000 worth of 'gates' to a 25-cent phone call — "art." And if anybody disagrees with you, you can call them a philistine.
Christo previously filled a California valley with yellow umbrellas, and once dressed up the Reichstag in aluminum fabric (fortunately for all of us, he did this in 1995, not earlier). He claims to have been planning this newest version of "public art" since 1979.
Evidently he rushed it.
Even before the fabric was installed this morning, the gates looked like over-sized track and field hurdles that the artists optimistically identified as "saffron" in color. They are, in fact, screaming psychedelic paint orange: the same awful color they make road cones, and those stupid barrel things that block off traffic lanes.
As I said on Countdown Thursday, they look like a terrible mistake of some sort — like somebody was trying to build something and ran out of money. I expected then that the vast billowing orange bed-sheets still to be hung, would make Central Park look like it was filled with the rotting shells of giant lobsters.
Turned out I was being kind.
When the wind is calm, the fabric hangs there looking like nothing less than highway maintenance or detour signs with their messages covered over. When the breeze flutters, they resemble ugly, cheap, plastic shower curtains, stolen from some $29-a-night motel, drying on somebody's backyard clothesline.
It'll be getting better soon. As I write this, nightfall approaches. Once it gets dark I won't be able to see them as well.
I might note here that I am as aesthetic as the next guy. My father is an architect and I inherited some of his skills and most of his perception of design and form. I have original art on my walls and a nice kitschy 10-foot tall Mona Lisa in my dining room. I don't know much about art, but I know what I hate.
There are three non-artistic problems here, too.
I live across the street from Central Park. I don't have to — it's my choice and I don't seek your sympathy. But I do it because Central Park is inherently beautiful: winter, summer, spring and fall. If you live in this city, and you can afford to have a window that shows you just a swatch of the park, you must. It reconnects you to the Earth. It reminds you of every green place you've ever been. And it's almost non-commercialized. I can't see a billboard or an advertisement from my window — and not a lot of people in a city anywhere in this country can say that. I don't need a bunch of giant, glowing orange croquet wickets fouling that up.
Problem number two: despite the anticipated revenues from tourism, despite the private funding by Christo and friends — the city says it's going to have put hundreds of cops in Central Park, to protect "The Gates." There have already been attempts to vandalize and graffiti-ize them.
My alibi is airtight — and I will not testify against my neighbors.
The city will spend thousands of dollars of my taxpayer money to pull the cops from things like, ohhh, counter-terrorism and crime prevention, to make sure nobody spray-paints any of the 7,500 "Gates" with the message "You Left Your Laundry Out, Lady."
Lastly, there is that awful, awful, color — and its inspiration. They can call it "saffron" from now until doomsday. What it is, it turns out, is the exact color of the hair of
New York City believes that between 90-thousand and 200-thousand tourists will come to town to see them between now and when they are mercifully removed (hopefully by volunteers with axes) on February 27th. I interacted with some of the tourista this afternoon, watched as they reached up to touch them just the way the antenna touches those rubber mats as your vehicle enters the carwash. And I thought of the old story of the Emporer's New Clothes. Only the really hip, the really artistic, can tell just how beautiful The Gates are. Everybody else is a Philistine.
But I noticed something else: New Yorkers walking their dogs through the park, as they do, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. And as they passed these strange glowing trellises, the dogs were invariably marking them.
The dogs know what they're doing.
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