Underwhelmed by 'The Gates' in New York

A week ago Saturday I visited Central Park to see Christo and Jeanne-Claude's "The Gates," a long-awaited public art event consisting of 7,500 vinyl gates with saffron-colored fabric panels—in the artists' words, "a visual golden river." In search of a gorgeous reddish-gold suggesting a child's mirth or an unexpected kiss, I instead found a drab orange evoking prison garb. The panels—made of nylon, the material of seat belts and toothbrush bristles—imitate mediocrity at best, even with generous aid from the sun. At a cost of $21 million and with a lifespan of just 16 days, "The Gates" is a fleeting spectacle bloated with false import and undue media attention; it is, in essence, a Hollywood marriage.

The successive gates winding along the park's paths are reminiscent of rites of passage, like your parents' bringing you home for the first time or your walking through Fitz-Randolph at graduation. But without any discernible purpose — the artists declined to attach meaning to their work — the gates felt like a ring without a promise, a sacrament without God, a holiday without cause for celebration. They were simply a splurge.

The artists explained, "Our works are temporary in order to endow the works of art with . . . the love and tenderness . . . usually reserved for other temporary things such as childhood and our own life. These are valued because we know that they will not last." By that logic, access should also be expensive and exclusive, to further inflate the value. Would anyone propose the destruction of "The Last Supper" so that we could show it more "love and tenderness" beforehand? The comparison to life clumsily disguises the emptiness in the work, which is like a comic who performs in five-minute stints because more time would expose his lack of talent.

Our culture often ignores the longterm and immaterial, and dismisses patience and hard-earned wisdom over time. Last Monday, Bob Herbert of The New York Times lamented that with Arthur Miller's passing, America has lost a great thinker, a member of an increasingly small sliver of our population. "If you can't say it in 30 seconds, you have to move on," Herbert said. "By the early '50s the agony of the Depression was gone and . . . the dean of Mr. Miller's alma mater, the University of Michigan, was complaining that his students' highest goal was to fit in with corporate America rather than separating truth from falsehood."

This lack of urgency, I think, is related to the rise of moral relativism, which seems simultaneously to acknowledge our fallibility and give us too much credit. We don't find all equally qualified to opine on matters other than moral — the only area in which we grant everyone expertise and a chance at finding the answer. The legitimacy of all moral viewpoints presupposes that their adherents have wrestled with the big questions at length and with perseverance, seeking the truth even if that truth may be startling or difficult to accept. Even moral relativism's strongest proponents should advocate this mentality.

Instead, many of us settle for any answer, a quick answer — they're all correct anyway — and are distracted from the higher dimensions of our being by ephemeral pleasures. We strive for luxury and thrills; we inject false meaning into various spectacles to which we give all our money, talents, and attention. But "The Gates" — albeit impressive in a showy, hollow way — doesn't deserve our "love and tenderness," nor should we allow it to encourage our moral stagnation and complacency.

Though the art failed to move me, I found unexpected sources of delight that day, including two toddlers on their parents' shoulders who reached for the billowing fabric with tiny fingers, their bright chatter drifting into my ears. At dinner, a little girl on a "date" with her grandmother primly asked the French waitress whether her countrymen "use ketchup too, like us" before consenting to dab her fries in the suspiciously American condiment. And as I settled appreciatively into easy conversation, I discovered that gorgeous reddish-gold that had eluded me all day — right in my sweet potato soup. Julie Park is an English major from Wayne, N.J. She can be reached at jypark@princeton.edu.