The roundabout at the park's southwest corner is, after all, a monument to consequentiality: Atop his 40-foot pillar, Christopher Columbus looks
around Manhattan like the guy who made all this possible--- which, in some measure, he is. Though he's now dwarfed by the innovative architecture of telecom corporate HQs, the Admiral of the Ocean Seas still demands his props. (So does gilt William Tecumseh Sherman, guardian of the park's southeast entrance: To rate one of these spots, you have to either discover a new world or burn down an old one.)And entering the park by the circle's Merchant's Gate is like running a referential gauntlet. The major distraction is the U.S.S. Maine Memorial, a 1913 massif carved with the names of the crew of the battleship that blew up in Havana Harbor in 1898, providing the dubious pretext for the Spanish-American War. (Headlines screamed, "SABOTAGE!"; later investigations whispered, "accident.") But statutes, plaques and commemorations of various kinds are everywhere, especially when you reach the foot of the Mall and step into the arcade of curling elms and bronze penmen known as Literary Walk.
Of course, by then we'd passed between several hundred of "The Gates"' 7,500 bright orange paired pylons, and under an equal number of flapping, bright-orange clouts of nubbled synthetic fabric. They were pretty, despite the fact that the advertised "saffron" orange wasn't really all that far off from everyday U-Haul orange. The light of a bright winter afternoon sometimes filtered through the drapery to impart an orange glow to park pathways. And how could all that effort at outdoor dress-up not be cheery? Yes, it was a $23-million effort, admirably organized and engineered, but the park would likely have been quite as beautified by so many hanging flags of all nations, or donated quilts, or super-size beach towels printed with poems from Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.”
But of course, "The Gates" was devoid of all such possibly divisive or limiting or ennobling content, and so was merely, and quite pleasingly, pretty.
Surrounded by statues of Shakespeare and Byron, Halleck and Burns -- none of them great statues; but then again, I'd venture to predict that "The Gates" won't make anyone's 21st-century Top 100 in 2099 -- it was hard not to question the meaning of meaningless public art. Central Park itself is an artwork, a huge, evolving "installation" of a complexity and profundity that makes "The Gates" seem like a pencil doodle. And its content is a sermon on citizenship and civic virtues. "The Gates" succeeded, I think, because they invited us to celebrate this treasure--- but in that sense, they had no more intrinsic meaning than the gallery light that shines on the "Mona Lisa."
What does it mean that we're embracing public art that, of itself, says nothing to the public? What does it mean that the most prominent recent proposals for meaningful public art -- e.g., the World Trade Center rebuild and the WWII memorial on the mall in D.C. -- are specimens of bombastic kitsch?
Well, "art" that isn't about anything is the ultimate escapism. And kitsch is, in the main, the art of egregious self-congratulation. Neither intends to say anything accurate about who and what we are. (By contrast, though Columbus, Sherman, Shakespeare and the other Central Park statues are more or less hagiographic, they do proclaim our intent to embrace their works.) As the first celebration New York has thrown for itself since 9/11 (New Year's Eve doesn't count; it's for the cameras), the content-free "Gates" seems to say... "Let's not think too hard."
And that DOES ring true. Public art -- once devoted, as was Cleopatra's Needle, the 2,500-year-old Egyptian obelisk set up by the Metroplitan Museum, to the details of history and the ideals of civilization -- may have to play it safe in a society currently devoted to accepting the indefensible. How does one design a monument to preemptive attacks upon weak and distant neighbors? To nonexistent WMDs? To the government's bold assertion of the right to torture and hold without charge foreigners AND U.S. citizens? Columbus symbolizes visionary daring; Sherman, God's "terrible, swift sword" scything slavery and rebellion. Who would care to be cast in bronze as the embodiment of our brave attempt to exercise direct control over the lion's share of Middle Eastern oil reserves?
And since it's considered disloyal to even mention that last motivation -- despite its prominence in pre-war neoconservative game plans -- and since all the offered excuses for invading Iraq fell apart, this is a remarkably content-free war. Such a conflict can only be prosecuted by a nation with a remarkably content-free collective consciousness.
And that does seem to be what we're becoming. Francis Fukuyama got "The End of History and the Last Man" wrong. He thought that free-market capitalism and liberal democracy had triumphed over competing ideologies (e.g., Soviet-style communism) and that capitalism and liberal democracy would co-reign over the future. He somehow didn't foresee that --- sure as the collapse of the Soviet Union would lead to a U.S.-China superpower struggle -- capitalism and liberalism, left all to themselves, would not co-exist but duke it out. And right now, capital is hitting liberal democracy right where it lives: in reason, information, memory and debate.
It was one thing for the Hearst papers to shout incendiary half-truths in 1898, when any major city had several important newspapers offering in-depth coverage of the truth's other halves. Today, FOX News is the only "news" source for half of a non-reading nation, and informs that half so badly that most still do not realize Saddam Husseim had no WMDs and nothing to do with 9/11. The slice of all network news time devoted to reporting (high overhead) international and national stories of consequence is now much smaller than the whopping helping devoted to (cheaply produced) lifestyle and local crime segments, and it's shrinking to the size of a parsley garnish. Capitalism is unmaking journalism, dismantling the Fourth Estate. The bottom line is that content costs too much -- and that's fine, since a lot of that content would only embarrass and inconvenience the very corporations that own the news media. News-wise, history-wise, we're entering an era of extremely noisy silence, of bright, quick cuts to emptiness.
Walking back out of the park, out of "The Gates"' blank orange blare, I passed the Maine monument again. This time I noticed that the names of officers and crewmen on its northwest side -- carved just 92 years ago -- were already almost illegible, smoothed away by acid rain.
--- HistoryBuff
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