With $3.50 and a Dream, the ‘Anti-Christo’ Is Born | Sarah Boxer
http://tinyurl.com/4jcnp
“You’ve seen Christo’s ‘Gates’ in Central Park. But what about Hargo’s ‘Gates’ in Somerville, Mass.? Sure, Hargo is unabashedly riding on the coattails of Christo and Jeanne-Claude. But it did take him some time to make his gates: 0.002 years, he estimates. That’s a good chunk of a day. You may as well take a look: not-rocket-science.com/gates.htm”

Gated | Peter Schjeldahl
http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?talk/050228ta_talk_schjeldahl
“Of course, ‘The Gates’ is art, because what else would it be? Art used to mean paintings and statues. Now it means practically anything human-made that is unclassifiable otherwise. This loss of a commonsense definition is a big art-critical problem, but not in Central Park, not this week. What the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude have been doing for three and a half decades is self-evident. They propose a grandiose, entirely pointless alteration of a public place, then advance their plan in the face of a predictable public and bureaucratic resistance, which gradually comes to seem mean-spirited and foolish for want of a reasonable argument against them. They build a constituency of supporters, including collectors who help finance the project by buying Christo’s drawings and collages of it. What then occurs is like an annual festival – Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, a high-school prom – without the parts about its being annual or a festival. It feels vaguely religious. The zealous installers and minders, identifiable on site by their uniforms and chatty pride, are like acolytes. As with any ritual – though ‘The Gates’ can’t be a ritual, because it is performed just once – how people behave during the installation is what it is for and about. Then it’s gone, before it has a chance to become boring or, for that matter, interesting. “

The Gates on The Daily Show | The Daily Show
http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/commentary/2005/02/gates-on-daily-show.html
“Simply put, The Gates is a triumph Jon, an artistic milestone that may finally put New York on the cultural map. I don’t want to get ahead of myself here Jon, but I think this may do for the Big Apple what The West Wing has done for Washington DC, or what the band Asia did for that continent.”

Conceptual Advertising | Timothy Comeau
http://blogto.com/arts/2005/02/conceptual_advertising/
“In yesterday’s Globe and Mail [Simon Houpt wrote] ‘The most enlightening comment I’ve heard so far about The Gates came from a man who had no idea what it was,’ writes Houpt, ‘I don’t mean he couldn’t parse the meanings of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s 7,5000 five-metre high doorframes hung with fabric around Central Park, or that he didn’t know whether to call it conceptual art or environmental art or an installation. No, this guy didn’t even know it was art. […] He’d somehow missed all the pre-event press coverage. So as he gazed northward at the thousands of orange shower curtains flapping in the wind, he turned and asked me, ‘Are they advertising that fabric? ‘Christo and Jeanne-Claude call their piece ‘interventions’ because they intrude, or impose themselves and their works, on public spaces. This apparently freaks us out. We’re used to one very specific sort of intervention: commercial ones, otherwise known as advertisements. Indeed, many visitors to Central Park have quipped that it’s a shame the artists don’t accept sponsorships, since the nylon orange is a perfect match for the corporate colours of Home Depot’. ”