CHRISTO AND JEAN CLAUDES "THE GATES" FEBRUARY 12-27 2005, CENTRAL PARK

Nothing like this will ever be seen again. It was magnificent in every sense of the word.

Nothing like this will ever be seen again. It was magnificent in every sense of the word.

-centralmark

I hope they do a Gates Sequel sometime. But you are probably right.

"The Gates" was "THE GreATESt" 

I hope they do a Gates Sequel sometime. But you are probably right.

-tikinyc

Gates "The Sequel". Don't hold your breath for it but it is a nice thought.

The Gates was a very spectacular event in the history of Central Park and Manhattan but I'm sure they will come up with something even better sometime down the road...

The first one very nearly did not happen. Christo first went to the City back in 1979! to get approval for "The Gates". That's why you see it referred to as "THE GATES 1979 - 2005".

INSPIRATION FOR "THE GATES"

"FUSHIMA INARI" SHRINE NEAR KYOTO, JAPAN

A biting critique of "THE GATES"

FORGOTTEN DELIGHTS

Bearing that in mind, consider husband-and-wife team Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s The Gates. New York City officials have granted permission for The Gates to stand in Central Park for 16 days, beginning February 12, 2005. According to the website of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (where a 3-month exhibition devoted to the project will open in April 2004), The Gates “will consist of 7,500 saffron-colored gates placed at 10- to 15-foot intervals throughout 23 miles of pedestrian walkways.” Each gate will be 16 feet high, with 8 feet of fabric suspended from the crossbar.What message will The Gates convey? None at all. If you examine every fiber of the million square feet of fabric, you won’t be a nanometer closer to knowing what sort of person you’d like to be, what you should focus on, what sort of world you’d like to live in. Prominent art historians and critics at the Whitney, the Museum of Modern Art and The New York Times haven’t even tried to proclaim any meaning in The Gates. They merely assert that it will draw attention to Central Park. “It might work and it’s not permanent, so why not give it a shot?” asked the publisher of the New York Observer.
The twenty-year controversy over whether to allow The Gates to be erected in Central Park was driven largely by fears of the work’s environmental impact. In fact, there’s a much more basic reason for rejecting the project: the lack of any impact on the minds of those seeing it. If it conveys no message, it isn’t art. And if it isn’t art, why allow it in the Park? We might just as well grant permission to The Picket Fences or The Discarded Taxi-Bumpers.
If you want to enjoy art in Central Park, do your best to avoid Christo’s giant slalom poles. Instead, seek out the dozens of figurative sculptures scattered through the Park, from Duke Ellington to the Delacorte Clock, from the Maine Monument to Samuel Morse, from Still Hunt to the Untermeyer Fountain. Like genuine works of art ever since the caveman’s time, these have the potential to speak to you - to inspire, provoke and amuse you – in a way that Christo’s Gates never will.

An analysis of the price/cost of THE GATES - $ 20 MILLION
GREG.ORG

The total, then, for what you see: around $5.3 million.
Ummmm....
That's some markup. Is this a 4x rule of thumb? Like how a meal at a restaurant should sell for around four times the cost of the ingredients, or how a consultant is billed out at 4-6x her equivalent salary? That $20 million is starting to sound like that most un-New York of phenomena: a retail price.
That $15 million gap can't be attributed just to overhead, though. I've left off some very real expenses associated with the project, like R&D, engineering, wind testing, environmental impact studies, and the no doubt significant costs associated with getting the city government to sign off on an unprecedented project.
Using the Over The River model, C&J-C have engaged at least five specialist firms to produce some deliverable or another. And in that case, a project team location scouted throughout the Rocky Mountains over three consecutive summers to find a suitable location.
On WPS1, filmmaker Albert Maysles talks about C&J-C's five attempts over 25 years to get approval from the Mayor: Koch, Dinkins, Giuliani (twice) and, finally, Bloomberg. The Gates design was completely re-engineered (originally, they were to be stuck in the ground), triggering another series of expenses.
Still, even if all this is assumed to cost as much as the gates themselves--$5 million--that still leaves the tally $10 million short.,,,