26 Fucking Years

I saw "The Gates" today. I'm a worse person for having done so.

I really wanted to like the Gates. Really, I did. I spend most of my time being negative and making fun of stupid shit like the Gates but I wanted to try to open my mind, expand my horizons and all that shit that liberals like.

In case you've been fortunate enough to avoid the whole Gates hoopla, I'll summarise it presently:

Two "artists" with suspiciously French-sounding names, Christo (Male) and Jeanne-Claude (Undetermined, probably female) decided to do an "art" project wherein 7,500 "gates," literally 20-foot-tall orange frames with saffron tablecloths hanging down, are spread throughout Central Park.

Incredible, right? According to some, remarkably.

You ask: but there has to be some kind of variety to these things?

No. 7,500 identical orange (saffron, not orange, excuse me) monstrosities sprawling throughout New York's Central Park.

Oh, you say, but something as simple as that probably didn't take much time to conceptualize and execute, right?

They started planning and preparing this in 1979. When Jimmy "Miserable Failure" Carter was ignoring the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. 26 years.

7,500 identical orange edifices. 26 fucking years.

For my entire life, all the highs, lows, joys, miseries, little-league games, spelling tests, middle-school romances...from my birth and residence in the Village (when my dad still had all his hair) to Long Island to London to Columbia University, these "artists" were planning this. And for what? To cause a nuisance? 26 years, millions of dollars...for a nuisance? I'm a master of nuisances and it doesn't take time or money to pull it off. These people are horribly inefficient, however exquisitely obnoxious they may be.

So anyway, when I get to the park I immediately realize that actually walking through the park would be a fantastic waste of time, because by seeing one gate you've seen them all, so instead I decide to one-up Christo and Jeanne-Claude by causing an impromptu nuisance in the presence of meticulously planned one. Now THAT is art.

I begin screaming to no one in particular. I think Camille was embarassed at first but she's a weirdo artsy type so I think after a while she realized the delectable genius behind my behavior.

I continued to shout for a while until I realized that there were several park attendants wearing vests that said "The Gates" and holding staves with tennis balls on the end of them. Obviously, this interests me.

I go up to one kindly old woman with a vest and staff and ask her what the gates mean to her. Camille loses it and tells me to stop, thinking I was being disingenuous in my inquisitiveness. Well, I was, but anyway she promised to tell me what they meant to her if I would do the same. Being a reasonable fan of the arts, I obliged.

She said that the gates represented the uniformity of New York streets. Then she said the paths through Central Park were, quote: "serpentine."

Unsatisfied with the answer, I began to walk away and she called me back, reminding me that I hadn't told her what they meant to me. I said "the Gates mean that even though we're all different, we're really all the same."

What I should have said was that the Gates mean that we live in a society where people can waste millions of dollars and 26 years on this planet in order to place saffron tablecloths in Central Park and be called "artists."

I hate you Christo. Get a fucking last name.