DE-BUNKING CHRISTO'S "THE GATES" and other notes...

I've always considered Christo an artistic mountebank and his works a gigantic con job, and have never understood the enthusiasm his enormous constructions have elicited from the world of bourgeois art chat. I was living in Paris when Christo wrapped the Pont Neuf (left) , which I frequently crossed on my way to work -- and I found it incredibly ugly, a kind of giant condom sheathing the bridge's original beauty. The bridge's foot-way was strewn with the mammoth hawsers that held the wrapping in place -- making the Pont Neuf (built between 1578 and1604) look like a third-rate dock in Marseilles where the longshoremen had gone out on strike -- in such a way that one had to be careful to step over these cables so as not to break one's neck; and the installation's principal quality was its ability to attract busloads of Japanese tourists with their inevitable cameras, endless clicking hoards who blocked the sidewalk to the increasingly irritated Parisian pedestrians (most of whom -- in a land in which art is revered, -- considered Chrsto's wrapping a giant escroquerie.). Christo, by the way, is the scion of a family of rich industrialists in pre-war Bulgaria -- a period in which being a rich industrialist there meant one was a raving monarchist, a financial supporter of fascism, or both -- and in Christo's case his edifice complex has meant I've never been entirely convinced that this nut fell very far from the family tree. Christo's works strike me aesthetically as the modern industrial-art cousins of the humongous statues of Arno Breker, whose towering, muscle-bound Aryan gods one can easily imagine laboring to erect Christo's expensive fantasies.

Now, in the latest issue of the review New Politics -- one of my favorite radical journals -- the left historian Jesse Lemisch (whose books include the excellent On active service in war and peace: Politics and ideology in the American historical profession ) has a fascinating critique, dissection, and debate of Christo's latest humbug, "Art for the People? Christo and Jeanne-Claude's 'The Gates'":

"From February 12 to 27, New York City's Central Park was the site of an exhibition called 'The Gates: Central Park New York 1979- 2005,' by the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude (C/J-C--photo left). The Gates consisted of 7503 vinyl structures straddling 23 miles of park pathways, each gate 16 feet high, resting on steel bases (the equivalent, the city boasted, of two thirds of the steel used in the Eiffel Tower), with orange drapes (described by C/J-C as 'saffron') hanging down from the tops. This thing was ardently and uncritically supported and promoted by the New York Times, the local TV stations, NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and a private entity that has taken the Park somewhat out of public control, the Central Park Conservancy (CPC). has taken what should be public decisions out of public hands. And it was the boast of C/J-C that no public money was spent on The Gates: the artists' unexplained calculations indicated that they had laid out from their own pockets 21 million dollars plus 3 million for various expenses (See below for a debunking of this claim.)

"As we will see, the CPC offers a local example of the worldwide privatization of the commons. In this 'public-private partnership,' CPC's 'Corporate Partners' include Bloomberg, J.P. Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Consolidated Edison, ABC, Prudential, Goldman Sachs, Martha Stewart Living, NY Stock Exchange Foundation, Pfizer, and others. (The Board of Trustees includes, among others, such right-wing types as Richard Gilder, founder of the Manhattan Institute, and John Stossel of ABC). CPC

"For the New York Times, The Gates was a mini-WMD moment of uncritically retailing official handouts (with chief art critic Michael Kimmelman (left) playing Judith Miller). Along with other media, the Times was largely unwilling to look beyond official puffery. With a compliant press unwilling to investigate the financial arrangements, it is impossible at this point to know just what scandals lay behind this event....

"There is nothing in The Gates that resonates with, or plays with, themes in the park and thus no enhancement of our perception of it...the appreciations I've seen of The Gates as great communal event seem to me to ignore the shallowness of the thing...The Gates also played into the bread-and-circus policies of Mayor Bloomberg (right, in a NORML ad) , a patron of the project (he also bought two drawings, reportedly for $800,000). Bloomberg wants a new football stadium on the West Side, as part of New York's bid for the 2012 Olympics, and The Gates suits his post-9/11 strain of ‘Don't Worry Be Happy' (otherwise known as ‘Big Business Don't Leave'). The Gates made for friendly city politics and nice holiday aesthetics, and no one can be against sociability in the park.. Yet for what exactly was this festival of the people staged? The Gates prettied up an extraordinary public place, but the fanfare was empty of social consequence: the city blocked a demonstration against the Republican Convention in the park, but gave a green light to Christo. Out of one eye, then, I saw an enjoyable mass art event; out of the other, a telling instance of high kitsch in the Bloomberg-Bush era, a cross between the Yellow Brick Road and a grand opening where the packaging was literally all....

"[At long last] the Times carries an article on 'Enough about ‘Gates' as Art; Let's Talk About that Price Tag.' This openly ridicules C/J-C's dismissiveness and evasion ("the manner of royalty") as regards their repeated failure and refusal to present the basis for the claim that they spent 21 million dollars: 'it appears that at least some of the grand price tag for ‘The Gates' may be as conceptual as the work itself."'...And Lemisch quotes Blake Gopnik's Washington Post review, calling The Gates "dull . . . ...an orange schmatte . . . the latest thing in bourgeois beautification . . . elegant daywear..."

There's a lot more in Lemisch's long and carefully footnoted article (don't skip the footnotes -- they're a trove of useful insights), including a discussion of the left's ambiguous and often wrong-headed relationship to public art, the union-busting mentality behind the vision of the Central Park Conservancy's corporate promoters of "The Gates,"  and a debate with pro-Christoites, with citations from Katha Pollitt, Tony Hendra (nicely cynical as always), Paul Lauter and others. You can read the full text of Jesse Lemisch's article by clicking here....

In the same issue of New Politics is a thought-provoking essay by Ellen Willis  (left), a writer I've always appreciated greatly even when (as in this instance) I don't necessarily agree with every single observation she makes. Ellen's piece is "Three Elegies" for our late friend Susan Sontag (below right) -- and in it Ellen quotes Susan as writing: "'Art which evokes the themes of fascist aesthetic is popular now, and for most people is probably no more than a variant of camp . . . Art that seemed eminently worth defending ten years ago, as a minority or adversary taste, no longer seems defensible today, because the ethical and cultural issues it raises have become serious, even dangerous . . . Taste is context,  and the context has changed.'' That's a point to be kept in mind when experiencing Christo's work, too.

I must, however, particularly disagree with Ellen on her third elegy, challenging Susan's assertion that (as Ellen puts it) "illness has no aesthetic or moral meaning." That contention of Sontag's is, I believe, eminently valid -- as those of us who, like Susan and myself, have grappled in our lives with serious illness (we shared with each other our experiences and perceptions of our respective maladies) can attest, having experienced disease through a prism deep within our own bodies. Ellen's reaction to her own bout with cancer is different, leading her to insist that illness is "a spiritual crisis by definition." Certainly the politics of how a society reacts to illness, particularly one of epidemic proportions, has both moral and aesthetic meaning (as a journalist who has written extensively on the politics of AIDS, I have often meditated on these connections); but Ellen's view of illness strikes me as dangerously metaphysical, and therefore flirts with superstition. One of the particularities of Illness is that it can do very strange things to very bright people. For example, I witnessed what I considered a tragic transformation in the thought of a very dear friend, Guy Hocquenghem (left) , the essayist, novelist, and philosopher who was the leading intellectual figure of France's gay liberation movement in the 1970s, but who -- as AIDS began to take its toll on him -- moved away from some of the principles he had espoused and, after a lifetime as a viscerally anti-clerical atheist, began a journey backwards toward metaphysical superstition and religion in his writing before AIDS fully took him in its icy grip and carried him off in 1988. I was deeply disturbed and saddened by the change which illness wrought in dear Guy, a change which produced in me a profound feeling of loss greater than that death itself-- nor has he been the only valued friend of mine in whom I've observed a similar syndrome. Such is the power of illness and impending death that one must have an extraordinarily indomptable will to resist its psychological ravages that can distort the Self. Or, as Sartre said, in one of my favorite aphorisms from his work: "Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you."

SOME JULY 4th READING: If you can tear yourself away from the fireworks, ballgames, and nationalist celebrations tomorrow, check out my confrère Ian Williams' new piece just out in Salon, "The Spirits of 1776" -- if you thought that the American revolution was all about tea. Williams (right), a jolly Brit who is The Nation's UN correspondent, shows how the Boston rebellion was really all about...rum! Yo ho ho! And you can extend your July 4th revels usefully by buying Ian's just-published, first-rate new book, The Deserter: Bush's War on Military Families, Veterans and His Past.

A BUSH GRAB FOR CONTROL OF THE INTERNET: The Associated Press reports today that "A unilateral decision by the United States to indefinitely retain oversight of the Internet's main traffic-directing computers prompted concerns Friday that the global telecommunications network could eventually splinter.the Internet. 'This seems like an extension of American security in the aftermath of 9-11,' said John Strand, a Denmark-based technology consultant. 'People will ask: `Do the Americans want to control the Internet?'" Read the rest of this important dispatch by clicking here (thanks to Raw Story for spotting this one.)