Orange parade

YOU would not, I suppose, like to be beaten with a stick. Yet Zen masters sometimes hit their students, to call them from unprofitable meditation. It is a rude way of focusing the attention; of saying, "Look." New York had a little look moment with the Gates, a collection of thousands of short orange banners suspended from tall door frames that were briefly arranged throughout Central Park.

The first impression of the Gates was to make this archetypal modern city seem medieval. During the Middle Ages New York was inhabited by elk. But suddenly Central Park became a neighborhood of Siena, competing for the Palio. The Gates were patrolled by men carrying poles topped with green tennis balls--long fuzz-tipped contraptions meant to gently disentangle the banners when the wind wrapped them round their jambs. These functionaries added to the ye olde effect; perhaps they were seneschals or reeves, one of those titles you blip over in Chaucer. Alternatively the Gates seemed oriental. Cavalry flags in a Kurosawa battle scene? Commemoration of the Buddha's liberation from the wheel of existence? Celebration of the Dear Leader's second Five Year Plan? Hard to say. The inscrutability added to the illusion. Seen at a distance, across the Sheep Meadow, the Gates recalled lines on a map: the F train, running from 179th St. in Jamaica to Stillwell Avenue in Coney Island (ex-press in Qns, local in Man and Bklyn); William III, clashing with the Duke of Luxembourg at Steenkirk and Neerwinden; subways and campaigns, punctuated by express stops and hecatombs.

Simile is the refuge of lazy critics. What of the objects themselves? The timing of the Gates was terrific. At the end of winter, dead grass, barren trees, frozen ponds, and sunless sky unite in a palate of gray and brown. When the temperature sits at 30 degrees, the Park is abandoned to joggers and gulls. The Gates brought color and crowds. They slyly implicated other objects. The roof of the Metropolitan Museum happened to be festooned with orange construction-site mesh while the Gates were up: Was that part of the show too? The lake in the lower middle of the Park was guarded by red barrier fences, warning thrill seekers of thin ice; they became next-door neighbors to the Gates on the color spectrum. Some aspects of the Gates were bungled. The frames had to be secured against being toppled, by wind or vandals, but the necessary bases were black, splayed, and ugly. The banners themselves seemed too short, reminding former Parks commissioner Henry Stern of shmattas. Longer banners would have billowed more seductively, but they would have gotten in people's way. The best way to view any one gate was to look straight up as you walked beneath. Then the fabric hung down like a drop curtain, making you an actor.

This being New York, the Gates were most notable for the talk they stimulated. For days the critics raged, with passion and without sense. Some of the most engaged critics were friends of mine (you know who you were). The Gates, it was said, desecrated a great work of art, Olmsted and Vaux's Central Park. Maybe so, but they were hardly alone, and they were also temporary. We're stuck with Balto, Daniel Webster, and several dozen other permanent people and animals. Were the Gates art? Of course not, but is every public spectacle--fireworks, parades, Ice Capades--art? But Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the designers of the Gates, call themselves artists. So we accept everyone's self-definition, do we? Tolstoy called himself a moral reformer, but he was actually an artist. Surely the $21 million the Gates cost could have bought better art--say, a corner of the Met's new Duccio. Beware that argument; at its end, we must spend several trillion dollars commissioning Bach and Shakespeare to write a musical, and buying not one lesser thing besides (or perhaps we spend it all on the world's most wretched tsunami orphan with AIDS, and buy no art whatsoever).

Wiseacres had a field day. One genius built a series of little gates on his kitchen floor; an even greater genius erected a line of orange crackers on the balustrade of one of the Park's ornamental bridges, then fed them to the ducks. These masterpieces became the toasts of the Internet. The Gates painlessly absorbed the ribbing, adding one more snowball to the avalanche of hype. Christo and Jeanne-Claude are surely geniuses at self-promotion, if nothing else. The grumblers held this against them too, as if it were a new thing in the history of culture. When young Walt Whitman finished Leaves of Grass, he sent it to Ralph Waldo Emerson, in part, no doubt, because Emerson was the greatest living American writer. Could he also have sent it because Emerson was the most famous living American writer, and thus in the best position to write a good blurb? When New York turns its back on hype, it will be time to move to Philadelphia, or some other necropolis.

I took my longest walk through the Gates on the West Side of the Park, from the New-York Historical Society to Cafe des Artistes. The day was leaden and damp. Only witch hazel and willows were stirring; the bark of plane trees was white and scabby. A woman wearing high heels and showing a summery expanse of leg was getting her picture taken by a gate. An earnest young man who said he was doing a documentary asked me to share my thoughts with his camcorder. Automobile access to the Park, always whimsical, was more restricted than usual to facilitate the march of the Gates. I had the thoughts I have shared with you, then went indoors for an hour or two.