Christo, Change-O!

I’m just mad about Saffron
Saffron’s mad about me
I’m just mad about Saffron
She’s just mad about me
—“Mellow Yellow,” Donovan

So what did my dog Ilsa and I stumble upon early this morning as we entered Central Park from Columbus Circle?

Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s “The Gates,” $21 million worth of saffron-colored posts and drapes covering 23 miles of the park’s walking paths. The local news had been abuzz about this mammoth art project for months. But I’d been so out of the loop—working, commuting to a client in New Jersey and ironing out the kinks in my business plan—that I hadn’t realized it was finally unveiled last Saturday. Needless to say, we hadn’t been to the park in a while, either.

But as we crossed Central Park South, the sun just beginning to glint off the building facades staring to the east, there it was, bidding us to enter as a gust of wind blew back the first few drapes along our favorite walking route. Her leash removed, Ilsa darted ahead and then stopped to sniff the base of one of the posts; animal smells, no doubt. A little further on, I noticed a tree branch had snared one of the drapes. Leave it to Nature to remind us mere mortals who's boss, I thought.

I’m not a big fan of conceptual art, but I have to say, “The Gates” impressed me. Walking to the top of a hill, you could begin to sense the grand scale of this project. Everywhere you looked, posts and banners lined the paths like an army specially dispatched to herald the arrival of every soul entering and traversing the park. I could only imagine what the view must look like from any one of the high-rise apartments ringing the park’s borders.

“The Gates” is art that makes you feel quite glad to be alive and breathing in 2005, thank you very much. Inasmuch as it dominates the scenery somehow it doesn’t shine a spotlight on the egos of its creators; nor does it bear any trace of the “Look at me! I’m controversial!” school of postmodern art that abounds today.

Instead you get…lots and lots of orange. Very late ‘60s or early ‘70s. Very Donovan. Looking at "The Gates," you want to yell, “Hail Atlantis!” You can’t help but smile over the fact that a fellow human had the chutzpah to dream this thing up. Not to mention the clout and resources to pull it off.

At the end of the month, “The Gates” will be taken down after a gleeful run of 16 days. Then Central Park will just be Central Park again. Just in time for Spring.