GATED.(The Talk of the Town)

An art critic was testily perambulating "The Gates," in Central Park, with his wife and a friend from Texas on the first Sunday afternoon of its installation when he suddenly got a load of their thousands of fellow-walkers and registered the common mood--a sort of vast, blanketing, almost drowsy contentment. He couldn't think of any other occasion on which he had witnessed so many New Yorkers moving slowly when they didn't have to. Each person looked strangely, nakedly personal: not a New Yorker at all, or anything else in particular. The crowd's many-voiced sound had an indoor intimacy, like the bright murmur in a theatre, during intermission, when the play is good and everybody knows that everybody knows it. The over-all social effect, which was somewhat like that of an electrical blackout or a major blizzard, minus the inconvenience, was weird and terrific. (You could give yourself a nice scare imagining "The Gates" magically removed, and leaving the people looking as they looked--a goofball "Night of the Living Dead.") The voluble disaffection of the art critic, me, collapsed, to the relief of my companions. I had to admit the reason for it, which was that "The Gates" is a populist affront to the authority of art critics, and to accept being just another shuffling, jostling, helplessly chummy citizen.

Of course, "The Gates" is art, because what else would it be? Art used to mean paintings and statues. Now it means practically anything human-made that is unclassifiable otherwise. This loss of a commonsense definition is a big art-critical problem, but not in Central Park, not this week. What the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude have been doing for three and a half decades is self-evident. They propose a grandiose, entirely pointless alteration of a public place, then advance their plan in the face of a predictable public and bureaucratic resistance, which gradually comes to seem mean-spirited and foolish for want ...