what is happening?!?!?
it seems like new york nightlife
has been handed over to retards with
credit cards.
getting past a velvet rope
so you can drink a 40 in a bronco
with a spice girl LOOKALIKE?!?
it's too funny!!!

but also,.... sad.

When I was but a youngster in the early Sixties (the Ninteen Sixties, Daddy) and a Boy Scout (!) we used to go once a month to shoot at the police gun range located in the remote Rodman's Neck section of The Bronx. I don't know whether this was standard practice at the time (before they realized that kids might be better off not learning this skill,) or if our Troop Leader had some kind of "in" with the NYPD (looking back, he was some sort of early paramilitary survivalist nut and spent a lot of time hanging out at the local precinct.)
The target used was a human form of a thug-like white guy, half-crouching with a gun. Well, it is still in use today, known professionally as "Advanced Silhouette SP-83A". There is a great article about who the drawing might have been modeled after in the NY Times:

Cops' Favorite Target...

Oh, BTW, I got some kind of award then for the most "kills". Go figure.

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The Gates....

OK so this gave me a chuckle.... http://www.not-rocket-science.com/about_gates.htm

I am one of the few folks in this city who 1. Have NO interest in The Gates (Christos project, in Central Park)... 2.Have no interest in the wanker artists (watch the Maysels doc. these people are arseholes)
I think its real sick that $20m.US (ok of their own money) was spent on this ...in this day and age when Congo, Sudan, education, health issues all need funding. I find it criminal... i know, i know.. y'all disagree... but HAD to say it..

In the words of my 4yr old "..why are they doing that in the park, why?" - good question my son...

Bah humbug

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I'm with you Anna Nicole...$28 million on 7500 pieces of plastic and cloth..I could have done it for so much less...The world's gone mad!

Thank goodness I'm not the only one who thinks so...I ran into a construction crew when the metal bases were being unloaded. I asked them what they were for and the guy said, " Art."
"What kind of art?"
"Fabric."
I started laughing, and the guy protested, "No really, it's fabric. It's going to be really nice. They're spending millions on it!"

I couldn't stop laughing. The dogs will have pee markers.
To think people actually gave money to this.

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I agree completely!!! Went and saw it with a few friends and thought it was completely ridiculous. Perhaps if they were all on fire and there were naked people running below twirling batons I would have found it interesting.

I'll probably go look at it. No one I've talked to who has seen it was particularly impressed. Christo is so 20th century. He had to fight for this thing for like 20 years until his "friend" Mayor Puff Puff Blommberg said yes. With friends like Puff Puff who needs an art critic. Christo's specialty has been to impose his geographically massive ego on entire city populations. Wrapping the Pont Neuff or the Reichstag in a sheet was kooky and nice. But who really wants to be a human croquet ball?

Everyone is free to dislike the Christo installation, but like it or dislike it on its own merits, not by its price tag. The "I could've done it myself for less" gripe has been done ad nauseum since Warhol painted a Campbell's soup can. Everybody looked at it, scratched their heads and said "I coulda done that". But they didn't do it, Warhol did it and it changed history and inspired legions of future artists. Likewise with the "in this day and age" bit, as if there weren't world problems or catastrophes occurring in every day and age, not just this one. We could use that cliche, tried-and-true line of attack to invalidate any expenditure at any time. It's being used by the Bush administration right now to slash NEA funding because Art is Not Important. Yet Arnold Schwarzenegger's last movie cost $120 million and there is no moral outrage. Millions are spent DAILY in Iraq by the US, UK and others. As always art is the easy target to kick down with the excuse that we can't spend money on it without recognizing its power to transform or elevate someone's life or at least leave someone with a lifelong memory. The Gates was financed by private donors and a loan Christo took out which can all be made back through autographed Christo pieces that sell for $10,000 a piece. But the money is not the point. It's the 'same old-same old' that people can't step outside of themselves for 10 minutes to see the world through an artist's eyes. If you feel that strongly about it then take out your own loan for the tsunami victims or paint your own soup can. But don't disparage an artist just because he had a grand scale ambition and realized it.

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Said better than I could Lex, yes. Totally agree. I wanted to reserve judgement till I saw it for myself, which I did yesterday. Have to say, it was pretty underwhelming. At best. I walked and walked and walked, waiting to come upon a vista that "moved" me. Didn't happen. I found the pumpkin orange (it's not saffron) of the gates kind of dull, too muted, and against the brownness of the park at this time of year, well, the color combo just didn't cut it for me. And though there are thousands of gates throughout, it somehow didn't seem enough. The enormity of the park, to me, just dwarfed the installation. I couldn't help wanting more, excess. So it wasn't my cup of tea, but thousands of other folks seemed really to be enjoying it, and the effect on city business is undeniable...I had to walk to 2nd Avenue to find a place to eat at 4 p.m. on Saturday; every restaurant on the UES was packed to capacity. And the subway back downtown afterward was a full-on rush hour crush. So good for Christo and wifey for realizing this hulking project, even if I did leave asking ""..why are they doing that in the park, why?"

Hear, hear, Lex!
And at its very least, "The Gates" has inspired an incredible public discourse about that too-often forgotten muse-- Art. And not only on these boards. The woman who comes in to help my father care for my mother, a capable, crusty New Englander, who barely has the time or patience to comment on anything outside of her immediate frame of reference (although she did give me an earful about "those damn rich Republicans" back in November,) embarked upon a lengthy and impassioned critique starting with the Christos' work and ending with Duchamp's urinal! If "The Gates" should inspire such ruminations about the nature of artistic expression by the general public, well then it's well worth the millions spent, IMHO... why I haven't heard so much talk about art since the NEA brou-haha!

In much the same way, I think, that the "DaVinci Code," for all its mangling and distorting of the history and myth of one of my fave subjects-- the Knights Templar-- is ultimately a success because it has encouraged people, who would not be inclined to do so, to pick up a book and actually read something... Although of course I am now sick to death about all the PR it has generated, as well as the endless television shows.

Although I haven't yet seen "The Gates" unfurled, I will be doing so this week. I suspect, however, that the construction really works, as someone pointed out, from a distance. It reminds me a bit of those crop circles when viewed from the air-- quite beautiful and grand.

I have heard that the sight of "The Gates" up in The North Meadow, a place in Central Park that I have never been (!), is quite impressive as it meanders, crossing the meadow and disappearing from view.

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Discussions about the merits of the art itself are all well and good. I don't mean to defend the Gates as if it's the best thing since sliced bread. It isn't. And if you think it's bad or mediocre art, fair enough. I just think it's lame to attack it for its monetary cost. Throughout history there have always been floods, droughts, plagues, earthquakes, etc that have destroyed human lives and communities. Does that mean we should not have art? We can always make the excuse that there is something more pressing to spend money on. The Bush administration would have us all believe we don't need art, that it's an unnecessary extra that adds no value to the human experience while they wage wars in the name of "freedom" and "democracy". But it's not a question of milk for the orphans vs. a Picasso. One has nothing to do with the other. How much did it cost to make the Lord of the Rings trilogy, for example? Or artsier fare like Finding Neverland? Or trashy TV shows that we watch and love? Or even commercials or concert tours or state-of-the-art rides at Disneyworld? It's all relative. At least the Gates was financed privately and is FREE for the public. What more can be asked of the artist?

Hmmm. I, for one, didn't mean to imply it is ridiculous beacuse of the money, I meant to imply it is ridiculous to imply it is art. And that it is ridiculous to spend that much money on useless FABRIC.
The emperor has no clothes! Heh heh.

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I agree with Betty.... (quel suprise)... i do feel the whole thing is kings new clothes... and I feel supported by Bloomberg its been given real positive mass media attention, which is obnoxious. Wish they could channel the attention to also showcasing other artists in the park or for it to be part of some other larger festival perhaps.... just feel that this is way too contrived and defo not justifiable.. and I see what u say Lex about Arnies movie being $120mill... but movies are not art any more just commercial ventures.. whereas Christos for me is always a commercial venture and not art... ahh i am just really old fashioned.

I think assessing art on the scale of Christo's latest empaquitage is not so simple. But let me say up front that for anyone to be creative at all now is a plus. But in this instance, like most where a rich establishment artist imposes work on the public (did we get any say in whether we wanted our park to be taken over and festooned by Christo? Did the parks commission have a say? Or was it just Puff Puff Bloomberg's say so?) a lot of the work's merit has to do with what the artist's motive was. And that is not easy to know even if they are professing their motive publicly (all the more reason to be cautious about their motive). For me in this case a lot of this has to do with the priviledged position Christo assumed as a friend of Puff Puff Bloomberg as well as the aesthetic that accommodates the giant ego behind a massive 'public' art work. Jean Claude says Christo and her make art just for themselves. In a sense all art shows how artists are self-indulgent. Some of the best art in my opinion is self-indulgent art, it just depends on what the artist's motive was. When Vito Acconci shows us a close up photo of his asshole, or William Wegman speaks directly into the video lens while holding his dog in his lap like it was a child while he unselfconsciously strokes the dog's balls, I'm not sure that is the kind of self-indulgence that really speaks to anyone else. So regarding Christo, just because a work of art is 'public' in its design, that does not necessarily free it from being over-ridingly an egotistically off-putting acte-de-presence. There may be more art to the gates in the coordination of their sheer production and hornswaggling of the local city bureaocracy than in their symbiosis with the park landscape. I like Christo and Jean Claude mostly for their personalities. They seem to be genuinely warm and smart. His artistic vision is unique. But there are many more examples than are needed of where huge, colorful, massively expensive, and nice to look at do not translate in to art that works on any other levels but those material, expenditure-based characteristics. But then, maybe that is the perfect aesthetic for public art in New York City. The art just has to appear to be another example of capital itself -capital of the psyche, finances and civic landscape. Maybe that is all it really needs to be to pass as art here; big, expensive and easy on the eyes.

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Did you ever go to Central Park on like a whim and then run into someone you know who lives, like, in Kansas -?

That happened to me the other day.

I did see the gates too. It was Tony Orlando.

I mean Jean Claude says her and Christo make art just for themselve and if anyone else happens to like it that is just an incident.

But the gates are pure top forty radio. So one has to wonder.

hate the gates, really hate them. a cabby drove into the parking lot of tavern on the green by mistake forcing merlin to see them one evening thank god in the dark.

europe has raped the american landscape for centuries. before the euros showed up in america a couple of hundred years ago there was NO MAJOR POLUTION PROBLEM on this continant. no polution three hundred years ago, look at it now, and three hundred years is a blink of the eye. europeans also kulled the small animals for furs accross northern US before the US took over the louisiana purchase. they killed every animal they could so that the americans could not have them. many species were almost abilterated. look at the buffalo.

europeans have come to this continant to remove nature and put up monuments to foreign gods and artists. europeans took major religious sites, bulldozed them and put up churches. it's not funny that it isn't an american artist hiding nature, it's a euro comming here to ruin our views and natural veiws.

and all the phonie artsy tourists pretending to be empressed while the artistic emporer has no clothes. it was rediculous and expensive. the people that are proud are only counting the heads and financial gain, they are not concerned about art rather fame and the obliteration of nature.

I LOVED THE GATES!!!

I thought they were gorgeous. I saw them about six times. Gorgeous. I LOVED the color, the design, everything. I really loved the thousands of people walking through them etc. talking about them. I loved it.

And today I'm going to see the Cy Twombly show.

OK, Christo is one thing but DON'T NOBODY SAY ANYTHING BAD ABOUT CY TWOMBLY!!!!!!

Oh wait, it's Tuesday.
It's closed.
Nevermind.

OK, talk amongst yourselves.

bzzz bzzz bzzz I adore Twombly...Where is the show?

I agree with Merlin though. The Gates was just as good on paper. It did not have to be erected. Another "score" for the idiot Philistine Bloomberg, intent on ravaging Manhattan however he can. Make the city a tourist trap instead of a livable entity. Yes Merly it WAS all about how many heads, and how much money it generated. A few hot dog sellers and t-shirts vendors made out. Wow, what a boost for the economy.

What was even more wretched was Christo conveniently positing that the art was about "nothing". What profundity. Just what we require, oh visionary, further anomie for this etiolated age!

Why didn't Bloomberg suggest Christo fund one of the falling-down rotten public schools that don't even have enough toilet paper, never mind enough teachers? Because that would suggest that there actually might be a problem over in that direction...

Lexy's point here that Art is art, and $20 Million here doesn't mean there should be $20. million over there is very well-reasoned, but in the end, that's a bloodie cold line!