HUE AND CRY: WE'VE BEEN HAD BY CON 'ARTISTS'
BY ANDREA PEYSER
February 14, 2005 -- WAKE me when these hideous things are gone!
It's time to let the truth be known: "The Gates" — that manically promoted, ludicrously expensive sculpture project now infesting Central Park — is the artistic equivalent of a yard that's been strewn with stained toilet paper by juvenile delinquents on Halloween.
It is the defacement of beauty, not its creation — a fraud perpetrated on the people by no-talent hypemasters and their chief cheerleader in City Hall.
Please, make them go away!
Walking into the park yesterday, I was assaulted by thousands of what looked like shower curtains twisting in the wind. I had found "The Gates."
Like a sucker in a game of three-card monte, I'd noticed I was about to be taken for a fool — and I'd ignored them.
The advance buzz had been all-consuming. "The Gates" was presented as the ticket for our stubborn, precious, maddening city to be elevated into something of a quasi-Eurotrash capital (except where the natives bathe regularly).
The artists seemed cute and quirky enough. And the mayor was positively giddy about it. That should have been the kiss of doom.
Now I realize we all were pulled into a kind of mass hysteria orchestrated by a couple of charismatic snake-oil salesmen — also known as the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude — and their pretentious booster, Mayor Bloomberg.
"The Gates" is an abomination. Call me a Philistine, but how can one improve on trees, lakes and rocky outcroppings with miles of plastic-treated cloth?
It's enough of a sin that "The Gates" overpowers Central Park's soaring, hypnotic beauty. But the color of these bed sheets, plunked down on metal frames every 12 feet throughout the park, is so atrocious that the project's creators ought to be charged with assault.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude claim that the hue of the weirdly pleated cloth is "saffron." But, as any American junior-high-school kid will tell you, the precise shade is "vomit orange."
"I can't get over how much it looks like an advertisement for Home Depot," said a laughing auxiliary cop I ran into.
And he said he actually liked them.
"A poet could say it looks like women's skirts," said Maureen Pielli, who drove down from West Chester, Pa.
"But the color!" said her husband, Arthur, who just couldn't get past it.
"I'm not impressed," said a young woman who works in the park making fanciful balloon animals for kids — an artistic feat that I'd like to see Christo and Jeanne-Claude match.
But that would take skill.
Thanks guys, really needed a laugh today! 
That color is a little... stark... And you should see some of their other "installations". They did something called "wrapped trees" that looks horrible.
