The cab drivers in New York, I am told, were most angry about Jean-Claude and Christo's "The Gates" project in Central Park.
Why? They were angry that $20 million was used for such a superfluous exercise in aesthetics. That Jean-Claude and Christo financed the project themselves didn't matter. Unlike the perhaps equally pointless (or not?) works safely isolated from the masses - in the Met, Whitney, and as if tucked away in maximum-security prison, the Dia-Beacon - "The Gates" punished park users in saffron orange.
Was it art? No. After the New York Times proudly called "The Gates" the most important public art project of the 21st century, the perspective shifted from viewing "The Gates" as art to viewing them as spectacle. The last New York Times review I read at first dismissed "The Gates" as any kind of aesthetic project - large, awkwardly proportioned rectangles? Saffron orange? Police barricades? Instead, it quickly lapsed into a commentary on the quiet and excited hubbub of New Yorkers and tourists walking through the park, feeling themselves part of something "larger than them." Nice. The country fair had a similar effect when I was a child. Against late-August dusk, the orange and red churning gleam of "the Zipper," cotton candy flavored red and blue, and cute yellow duckies that you could pick up and pet. So soft!
Not. Art.
Does it matter? No. It brought New Yorkers together into some semblance of a community - a feat rarely seen and commendable. It brought more tourists to New York, bringing the city badly needed tax revenue - perhaps Bloomberg can now afford social services.
Does it open a super-secret, back-door loophole into the world of art? Yes. Not-art is the new Art.
Here, buried in the middle of my opinion, is the point: I want you to consider Brown's new Life Sciences building art. Only at night. Stand on Thayer or Meeting Street after dark and look up. A massive grid of dark steel girders climbs into the sky, recollecting Sol LeWitt's white structural sculptures - the steel cuts a grid, ordering Providence's blue dusk like Anges Martin's rigid paintings.
But these references are partially obscured. White, translucent plastic covers the building's front two-thirds. Inside, bare, hanging light bulbs glare through the night. The effect is sublime: The structure emits a subtle white glow through the entire night. Such an exercise, on this scale, recollects Jean-Claude and Christo's draping of the Reichstag with a similar material. Yet their material was left largely to sway in the wind, as if a giant curtain had closed on Germany's past, consciously reminding German tourists of this fact. We might read the Reichstag project as Germans' collective venture into the future - closing a literal curtain on Act One of their history. Dismantling the project, opening the curtain, they entered Act Two.
The Life Sciences Project, plastic tightly gripping its steel structure, seeks not to draw a curtain on the past, but openly protect the future. It acknowledges both its strengths - the powerful steel beams - and its weaknesses - its exposure to the chilly winds of Ivy elitism. Scaffolding, irregularly climbing the Project's sides, quietly echoes its inner structure. Irregular, fragile and ephemeral, the scaffolding works not to emulate but to express the Project's weaknesses within the grander scale of human history. The Project places its emotions on the outside.
Jean Claude and Christo's Reichstag Project didn't glow. The Life Sciences Project, glowing through the night - expensive, but unlike The Gates, holding an innate greater purpose (Science! Progress!) subtly illuminates the Providence skyline as a beacon of the future.
Stefan Talman '05: clever, witty, pretentious.
