15 ms·

Christo has died

219 points by tin7in 6y ago

sharker8 6y ago
I got to see the gates in central park, he will be missed.
- technofiend 6y ago
  Same here and take a swatch they were giving away. Something about how ephemeral it was made it appealing. I tried taking photos but they never did any justice to the feeling of standing inside a giant artwork. I was saddened by the fact I couldn't share it with my wife since she wasn't in NYC, but maybe that was partially the point.
wavefunction 6y ago
he came to a part of my state that was probably not too famous for one of his projects at first I questioned the value but then I relaxed and came to appreciate the work he had created, the dialog, the introspection and the choice of place https://christojeanneclaude.net/mobile/projects?p=over-the-river https://christojeanneclaude.net/mobile/projects?p=over-the-r... it was an impoverished place from a capitalist perspective, but a place rich with stark beauty he acknowledged and leveraged into his art
- wwarner 6y ago
  It's really too bad that Over The River was never finished. I always like the idea a lot, and would have gone out there to see it. Anyway he and jean-claude moved on and did other pretty great things.
  - mc32 6y ago
    He did do the pink surrounded islands thing in Florida which was a pretty big endeavor on water.
    - wyclif 6y ago
      That was the first thing I'd ever seen by him when I was a kid (in a photo that was part of a National Geographic piece). I wish I could have seen it in person. I remember thinking how audacious it was to wrap an island in pink plastic and call it art. It was also my first exposure to large scale temporary art installation pieces.
  - cull 6y ago
    Over the River was one of many projects that Christo was deeply passionate about. When I spoke to him about the project six years ago he was still hopeful about it; it had been a non-realized project started with Jeanne-Claude. And he spoke of finishing their vision even after her passing, which seemed to affect him greatly. I am saddened of his passing.
hristov 6y ago
I also saw his gates in central park. He was a true artist -- his art brought joy. On paper it makes no sense why those things would make me happy, but boy they did.
- battery_cowboy 6y ago
  Man cannot live on STEM alone.
- acomjean 6y ago
  I love the gates. It didn't expect much, but it was truly amazing experience. I like experience art. I met a volunteer and he gave me a piece of the orange fabric.
- ponker 6y ago
  If you liked it try to visit Fushimi Inari in Japan.
suzzer99 6y ago
He wrapped the sidewalks of Loose Park in Kansas City in orange. Kansas Citians had no idea what to think. As a kid I thought it was pretty cool. Maybe it helped pave the way for the weird sculptures on top of Bartle Hall, and the equally weird shuttlecocks on the Nelson Art Gallery grounds - which Kansas City (eventually) embraced and came to love.
anm89 6y ago
Am I the only one who looks at this massive installations and views them as a massive waste of resources and intentional littering? These are multi-ton plastic monuments to some guys ego. Certainly not celebrating his death, he seems like a nice, interesting guy but it's hard for me to get behind the work.
- sp332 6y ago
  It's not really littering if it gets cleaned up later.
  - anewdirection 6y ago
    Except there are at least 3 posts here about finding the discarded fabric laying around. Most seems to have been repurposed, but the lack of having any use for it afterward seems a gross oversight. We are splitting hairs here, so I should acknowledge while it is not littering, it is still preponderously wasteful and short-sighted.
- ad404b8a372f2b9 6y ago
  It's uncharitable to diminish someone's art to just ego, feels sadly cynical. Our problem with pollution is systemic, what he's done is a drop in the bucket. Certainly we can't all afford to do it but to have one artist do it and for his pieces to achieve worldwide recognition I'd say it was demonstrably valuable to people.
- seumars 6y ago
  Thanks for reminding me to never read comments about art on this website again.
  - antonvs 6y ago
    Or read them, to remind oneself what a narrow perspective on the world one gets here. It's a bit like reading comments about technology from politicians. Although come to think of it, "The internet is a series of tubes" is actually probably more accurate.
sp332 6y ago
M Eifler had some VR experiments inspired by Christo's work, especially Surrounded Islands. The second part of this blog post describes them: https://web.archive.org/web/20190908211426/http://elevr.com/experimental-still-lifes-and-landscape-interventions/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190908211426/http://elevr.com/...
ftio 6y ago
The only meaningful C++ program I’ve ever written was a command line animation of Christo’s gates in Central Park. I was in high school and was incredibly cynical about the whole thing, so I made an animation of a very primitive ASCII Godzilla that would trample the gates after playing an ominous tune using Beeps. Now of course I regret my dismissive stance (the gates were very beautiful), but I’ll never forget that C++ program.
- battery_cowboy 6y ago
  He'd probably have liked that his art inspired you to make new art, artists usually love that sort of thing.
mistrial9 6y ago
after a "Christo's Fence" exhibit in the SF Bay Area long ago, a property owner acquired some materials from the effort and made an overhanging enclosure from it on his inner-urban property. While working away on some construction project, a muscular tattooed guy and I started talking about it, and the result was that I was dared to climb up to the three story roof and cross the alley on the Christo's Fence material alone (a sheer drop below). With the expression "danger == fun" in mind, I did cross the alley from above on the white cloth material -- it did not tear, I did not fall, and I had a lot of fun. Thanks Christo's Fence !
fsckboy 6y ago
For some reason I'm reminded of Bette Davis's famous remark on hearing about Joan Crawford's death: "You should never say bad things about the dead, only good… Joan Crawford is dead. Good.” My favorite art installation of this genre was not by Christo, but it was a spoof inspired by his "Gates" in Central Park, in reaction to a piece called "Floating Island" that was itself billed as an "anti-Gates". http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/09/24/arts/24isla.span.jpg http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/09/24/arts/24isla.s... https://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/24/arts/design/a-miniature-gate-in-hot-pursuit-of-a-miniature-central-park.html https://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/24/arts/design/a-miniature-g... background on Floating Island https://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/16/arts/its-not-easy-making-art-that-floats.html https://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/16/arts/its-not-easy-making-... more background http://eyeteeth.blogspot.com/2005/11/public-art-on-cheap.html http://eyeteeth.blogspot.com/2005/11/public-art-on-cheap.htm... TL;DR: long story short: Gates was a lot of orange "doorways" installed in Central Park in Manhattan. Then a piece of green landscape garden was towed around on Manhattan's rivers, on a barge, by a tugboat. But somebody was inspired to chase the barge in a motorboat with a Christo inspired orange doorway on it...
- antonvs 6y ago
  > For some reason I'm reminded of Bette Davis's famous remark on hearing about Joan Crawford's death: "You should never say bad things about the dead, only good… Joan Crawford is dead. Good.” Fascinating that his art had such a profound impact on your life that you feel this way.
- mikl 6y ago
  Yeah, never heard of this person before, but seeing what useless nonsense he managed to waste millions of dollars on, it is at least good that he won’t be wasting anymore art grants.
  - michaelt 6y ago
    Man, you sure will be mad when you hear how much money Magic Leap has spent with less to show for it.
jfoutz 6y ago
A few years ago I saw a retrospective, with a bunch of drawings and background stories from different projects. As I get farther in my career, I spend less time writing code, and more time convincing people that we should deploy that code. I think the art itself is neat, but haven't seen any of it in person. The years of negotiations with neighborhood, city, state, and federal organizations to actually put the art up, well that, that's pretty humbling.
- pavlov 6y ago
  I've thought that Christo and Jeanne-Claude had an interesting artistic business model: the finished works are public and free to view, but they sold large quantities of sketches and other artifacts to collectors to fund their work. I don't know if there are other established artists doing that. Maybe it's more common than I realize.
  - galfarragem 6y ago
    No, it’s not that common. While most artists stop at sketches - and Christo sketches are enough to grant him a relevant place in modern art (it really worths to study them) - he always pushed to realization whenever possible.
  - Daub 6y ago
    Yes... the so-called sketches were often done after the major work was already completed. Kind of like reverse preparatory work. His work was very expensive indeed, and tthis was one of the ways they funded it. That and tax write-offs from big buisness. I never understood the Jean Claude thing. She always insisted very vocally that she and Christo were a creative partnership. However, there is no discernable difference betweeen Christo's work before JC, and that which he produced after they partnered. So where is her creative inmput? My experaince of her is colored by a very colourfull fax I recived from her whilst interning at a major London gallery. I made the huge mistake of addressing a communication only to Christo.
asiachick 6y ago
I liked his work There was a 60 minutes episode long ago about him and his wife, probably the 80s. It seemed pretty clear she raised the money. What I remember most is that they, or her, were good at hobnobbing with the rich and getting them to donate millions for these projects. A single project might cost $20 million and to make it they might raise $40 million (and this was 1980s dollars)
- LanceH 6y ago
  In the, "I could have painted that" line -- I've always been more impressed that someone could raise the money and get the permits/clearances to do a lot of these things.
  - ponker 6y ago
    I hope that with sculpture and large scale installation art there aren't as many people who say "I could have done that." The job is more engineering than art, coming up with materials that can say, drape over a building with sharp projecting features but also be light enough not to pull down the structure itself, etc. Large sculpture even more so.
- georgeek 6y ago
  C&JC figured a way to finance their projects through a few big landmark donations along with a proto Kickstarter campaign. They would sell numbered plans and drawings with a deep discount before the event happens. They had different support tiers ranging from postcard to one of the first ten copies of each plan and have a thriving community of collectors.
- ncr100 6y ago
  I would like to see what they do for his burial site.
jhayward 6y ago
There is a lot of art that I don't 'get', and I've been sort of dismissivie-to-unaware of over the years. Christo's art is one of those. But as time has passed and I've had a chance to experience some of those artists work in person I've had a few a-ha moments where the art clicked for me and I now enjoy and appreciate them. Christos has been around long enough and talked about enough that I think there may be something that I could learn from it by seeing it first hand. I'm sad that I won't have the chance.
js2 6y ago
I lived in Miami when he wrapped the islands in Biscayne Bay: https://christojeanneclaude.net/projects/surrounded-islands https://christojeanneclaude.net/projects/surrounded-islands It was cool.
riffraff 6y ago
There is a documentary[0] of his work on Floating Piers[1] which is pretty nice. It was one of his latest projects, completed after Jean-Claude died, and it was _really_ impactful, with hundreds of thousands of people coming to "experience art" for free. It is sad to hear he won't be making more of this stuff, RIP. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZWQt5fg1eU&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZWQt5fg1eU&feature=youtu.be [1] https://christojeanneclaude.net/mobile/projects?p=the-floating-piers https://christojeanneclaude.net/mobile/projects?p=the-floati...
polynomial 6y ago
Nice to see the HN crossover here, he wasn't all that involved in, or connected to technology sectors. He has always seemed underrated to me, I wonder what history will have to say about that.
hoseja 6y ago
Huh, didn't know there was a real world Zima Blue.
supernova87a 6y ago
A couple thoughts on Christo: 1. The "waste of resources" argument never held too much importance in my mind, because he and JC were able to pay for the art installations on their own, as "wasteful" as that may be. That they were able to convince wealthy donors to pony up $ is something I'm sure many aspire to. And who are we to complain if someone can get others to believe in an idea with private funding? VCs, anyone? Kudos to them for their persuasiveness. And separately, on the apparent quantities of material -- much of that was pretty completely recycled (metal, plastic), so it was chiefly the manufacturing and installation labor that was really spent. You could equally say that it also produced jobs wherever their art went. 2. I think the thing that leaves the more dissatisfied taste in my mouth is that much of it didn't seem like very innovative or even subjectively amazing art. It only seemed to be self-fulfilling. In the sense that it was like the Kardashians -- they only seem to be popular because everyone says they're popular. Yet I don't get why they're popular. And similarly, looking at the art itself, if you didn't know better, nothing would say, "amazing", "world changing". (personal taste, of course) You almost suspect that Christo's beginnings were spaghetti thrown against the wall, seeing if anyone would buy into some silly idea of wrapping something in colored plastic, like he was grasping for artistic straws. And it was only because he proposed something so large and crazy that it was different. And then when the first or 2nd one got some odd traction, it turned into an unexpected snowball. If he hadn't gotten any early success, you wouldn't look at the ideas and retrospectively say they were stunning, and what a shame they didn't get built. I will say that the NYC gates and others that people were able to walk through and enjoy en masse were fun. But people like walking around in colorful new things anyway -- occupy the family for a couple hours. You wouldn't call Disneyland "art" exactly. And it never shook me out of the nagging thought that there was something disproportionate -- maybe even "unfair" or overhyped about the popular success of the guy -- much like if the boss's son were to be winning a bunch of art shows sponsored by the family. Or that he was only an "artist" by virtue of being able to get people to pay for his experiments and the bigness of them. Anyway, at least we have the memories to think about.
- lalalandland 6y ago
  Art as a big polluter and waste of resources seem like a stretch. Biggest polluters are military and agriculture. I don't think art would make it on that list.
tin7in 6y ago
Interesting fact that might have affected his works and ultimately millions seeing them. Christo's father was a prominent chemical textile manufacturer in Bulgaria and Christo was probably exposed to fabrics and textile rolls very early in his life.
javajosh 6y ago
Rest in peace. He was by far my favorite wrapper.
goodsignal 6y ago
I designed and built a burning man shade structure for out camp with one of Christo's Running Fence panels that we found in an old barn in Northern California. I was so glad about how many of my 'neighbors' knew about Christo. I got a little street cred from that :)
nikolay 6y ago
As a Bulgarian, I'm saddened. As an environmentalist - I only am saddened that another human being has died, but not much. But as an inquiring mind I keep wondering: Is wrapping stuff up a mental condition or artistry? :D
ZacharyPitts 6y ago
A bit late, but here's a very unique photo of the "running fence" taking from my backyard as a kid in Petaluma, Ca. You can see it 'running' along the top of the hill in the background. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Running_Fence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Running_Fence the photo: https://i.imgur.com/VVzzZjz.jpg https://i.imgur.com/VVzzZjz.jpg
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

Christo has died

219 points by tin7in 6y ago

sharker8 6y ago

I got to see the gates in central park, he will be missed.

technofiend 6y ago
Same here and take a swatch they were giving away. Something about how ephemeral it was made it appealing. I tried taking photos but they never did any justice to the feeling of standing inside a giant artwork. I was saddened by the fact I couldn't share it with my wife since she wasn't in NYC, but maybe that was partially the point.

wavefunction 6y ago

he came to a part of my state that was probably not too famous for one of his projects at first I questioned the value but then I relaxed and came to appreciate the work he had created, the dialog, the introspection and the choice of place https://christojeanneclaude.net/mobile/projects?p=over-the-river https://christojeanneclaude.net/mobile/projects?p=over-the-r... it was an impoverished place from a capitalist perspective, but a place rich with stark beauty he acknowledged and leveraged into his art

wwarner 6y ago
It's really too bad that Over The River was never finished. I always like the idea a lot, and would have gone out there to see it. Anyway he and jean-claude moved on and did other pretty great things.
- mc32 6y ago
  He did do the pink surrounded islands thing in Florida which was a pretty big endeavor on water.
  - wyclif 6y ago
    That was the first thing I'd ever seen by him when I was a kid (in a photo that was part of a National Geographic piece). I wish I could have seen it in person. I remember thinking how audacious it was to wrap an island in pink plastic and call it art. It was also my first exposure to large scale temporary art installation pieces.
- cull 6y ago
  Over the River was one of many projects that Christo was deeply passionate about. When I spoke to him about the project six years ago he was still hopeful about it; it had been a non-realized project started with Jeanne-Claude. And he spoke of finishing their vision even after her passing, which seemed to affect him greatly. I am saddened of his passing.

hristov 6y ago

I also saw his gates in central park. He was a true artist -- his art brought joy. On paper it makes no sense why those things would make me happy, but boy they did.

battery_cowboy 6y ago
Man cannot live on STEM alone.
acomjean 6y ago
I love the gates. It didn't expect much, but it was truly amazing experience. I like experience art. I met a volunteer and he gave me a piece of the orange fabric.
ponker 6y ago
If you liked it try to visit Fushimi Inari in Japan.

suzzer99 6y ago

He wrapped the sidewalks of Loose Park in Kansas City in orange. Kansas Citians had no idea what to think. As a kid I thought it was pretty cool. Maybe it helped pave the way for the weird sculptures on top of Bartle Hall, and the equally weird shuttlecocks on the Nelson Art Gallery grounds - which Kansas City (eventually) embraced and came to love.

anm89 6y ago

Am I the only one who looks at this massive installations and views them as a massive waste of resources and intentional littering? These are multi-ton plastic monuments to some guys ego. Certainly not celebrating his death, he seems like a nice, interesting guy but it's hard for me to get behind the work.

sp332 6y ago
It's not really littering if it gets cleaned up later.
- anewdirection 6y ago
  Except there are at least 3 posts here about finding the discarded fabric laying around. Most seems to have been repurposed, but the lack of having any use for it afterward seems a gross oversight. We are splitting hairs here, so I should acknowledge while it is not littering, it is still preponderously wasteful and short-sighted.
ad404b8a372f2b9 6y ago
It's uncharitable to diminish someone's art to just ego, feels sadly cynical. Our problem with pollution is systemic, what he's done is a drop in the bucket. Certainly we can't all afford to do it but to have one artist do it and for his pieces to achieve worldwide recognition I'd say it was demonstrably valuable to people.
seumars 6y ago
Thanks for reminding me to never read comments about art on this website again.
- antonvs 6y ago
  Or read them, to remind oneself what a narrow perspective on the world one gets here. It's a bit like reading comments about technology from politicians. Although come to think of it, "The internet is a series of tubes" is actually probably more accurate.

sp332 6y ago

M Eifler had some VR experiments inspired by Christo's work, especially Surrounded Islands. The second part of this blog post describes them: https://web.archive.org/web/20190908211426/http://elevr.com/experimental-still-lifes-and-landscape-interventions/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190908211426/http://elevr.com/...

ftio 6y ago

The only meaningful C++ program I’ve ever written was a command line animation of Christo’s gates in Central Park. I was in high school and was incredibly cynical about the whole thing, so I made an animation of a very primitive ASCII Godzilla that would trample the gates after playing an ominous tune using Beeps. Now of course I regret my dismissive stance (the gates were very beautiful), but I’ll never forget that C++ program.

battery_cowboy 6y ago
He'd probably have liked that his art inspired you to make new art, artists usually love that sort of thing.

mistrial9 6y ago

after a "Christo's Fence" exhibit in the SF Bay Area long ago, a property owner acquired some materials from the effort and made an overhanging enclosure from it on his inner-urban property. While working away on some construction project, a muscular tattooed guy and I started talking about it, and the result was that I was dared to climb up to the three story roof and cross the alley on the Christo's Fence material alone (a sheer drop below). With the expression "danger == fun" in mind, I did cross the alley from above on the white cloth material -- it did not tear, I did not fall, and I had a lot of fun. Thanks Christo's Fence !

fsckboy 6y ago

For some reason I'm reminded of Bette Davis's famous remark on hearing about Joan Crawford's death: "You should never say bad things about the dead, only good… Joan Crawford is dead. Good.” My favorite art installation of this genre was not by Christo, but it was a spoof inspired by his "Gates" in Central Park, in reaction to a piece called "Floating Island" that was itself billed as an "anti-Gates". http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/09/24/arts/24isla.span.jpg http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/09/24/arts/24isla.s... https://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/24/arts/design/a-miniature-gate-in-hot-pursuit-of-a-miniature-central-park.html https://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/24/arts/design/a-miniature-g... background on Floating Island https://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/16/arts/its-not-easy-making-art-that-floats.html https://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/16/arts/its-not-easy-making-... more background http://eyeteeth.blogspot.com/2005/11/public-art-on-cheap.html http://eyeteeth.blogspot.com/2005/11/public-art-on-cheap.htm... TL;DR: long story short: Gates was a lot of orange "doorways" installed in Central Park in Manhattan. Then a piece of green landscape garden was towed around on Manhattan's rivers, on a barge, by a tugboat. But somebody was inspired to chase the barge in a motorboat with a Christo inspired orange doorway on it...

antonvs 6y ago
> For some reason I'm reminded of Bette Davis's famous remark on hearing about Joan Crawford's death: "You should never say bad things about the dead, only good… Joan Crawford is dead. Good.” Fascinating that his art had such a profound impact on your life that you feel this way.
mikl 6y ago
Yeah, never heard of this person before, but seeing what useless nonsense he managed to waste millions of dollars on, it is at least good that he won’t be wasting anymore art grants.
- michaelt 6y ago
  Man, you sure will be mad when you hear how much money Magic Leap has spent with less to show for it.

jfoutz 6y ago

A few years ago I saw a retrospective, with a bunch of drawings and background stories from different projects. As I get farther in my career, I spend less time writing code, and more time convincing people that we should deploy that code. I think the art itself is neat, but haven't seen any of it in person. The years of negotiations with neighborhood, city, state, and federal organizations to actually put the art up, well that, that's pretty humbling.

pavlov 6y ago
I've thought that Christo and Jeanne-Claude had an interesting artistic business model: the finished works are public and free to view, but they sold large quantities of sketches and other artifacts to collectors to fund their work. I don't know if there are other established artists doing that. Maybe it's more common than I realize.
- galfarragem 6y ago
  No, it’s not that common. While most artists stop at sketches - and Christo sketches are enough to grant him a relevant place in modern art (it really worths to study them) - he always pushed to realization whenever possible.
- Daub 6y ago
  Yes... the so-called sketches were often done after the major work was already completed. Kind of like reverse preparatory work. His work was very expensive indeed, and tthis was one of the ways they funded it. That and tax write-offs from big buisness. I never understood the Jean Claude thing. She always insisted very vocally that she and Christo were a creative partnership. However, there is no discernable difference betweeen Christo's work before JC, and that which he produced after they partnered. So where is her creative inmput? My experaince of her is colored by a very colourfull fax I recived from her whilst interning at a major London gallery. I made the huge mistake of addressing a communication only to Christo.

asiachick 6y ago

I liked his work There was a 60 minutes episode long ago about him and his wife, probably the 80s. It seemed pretty clear she raised the money. What I remember most is that they, or her, were good at hobnobbing with the rich and getting them to donate millions for these projects. A single project might cost $20 million and to make it they might raise $40 million (and this was 1980s dollars)

LanceH 6y ago
In the, "I could have painted that" line -- I've always been more impressed that someone could raise the money and get the permits/clearances to do a lot of these things.
- ponker 6y ago
  I hope that with sculpture and large scale installation art there aren't as many people who say "I could have done that." The job is more engineering than art, coming up with materials that can say, drape over a building with sharp projecting features but also be light enough not to pull down the structure itself, etc. Large sculpture even more so.
georgeek 6y ago
C&JC figured a way to finance their projects through a few big landmark donations along with a proto Kickstarter campaign. They would sell numbered plans and drawings with a deep discount before the event happens. They had different support tiers ranging from postcard to one of the first ten copies of each plan and have a thriving community of collectors.
ncr100 6y ago
I would like to see what they do for his burial site.

jhayward 6y ago

There is a lot of art that I don't 'get', and I've been sort of dismissivie-to-unaware of over the years. Christo's art is one of those. But as time has passed and I've had a chance to experience some of those artists work in person I've had a few a-ha moments where the art clicked for me and I now enjoy and appreciate them. Christos has been around long enough and talked about enough that I think there may be something that I could learn from it by seeing it first hand. I'm sad that I won't have the chance.

js2 6y ago

I lived in Miami when he wrapped the islands in Biscayne Bay: https://christojeanneclaude.net/projects/surrounded-islands https://christojeanneclaude.net/projects/surrounded-islands It was cool.

riffraff 6y ago

There is a documentary[0] of his work on Floating Piers[1] which is pretty nice. It was one of his latest projects, completed after Jean-Claude died, and it was _really_ impactful, with hundreds of thousands of people coming to "experience art" for free. It is sad to hear he won't be making more of this stuff, RIP. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZWQt5fg1eU&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZWQt5fg1eU&feature=youtu.be [1] https://christojeanneclaude.net/mobile/projects?p=the-floating-piers https://christojeanneclaude.net/mobile/projects?p=the-floati...

polynomial 6y ago

Nice to see the HN crossover here, he wasn't all that involved in, or connected to technology sectors. He has always seemed underrated to me, I wonder what history will have to say about that.

hoseja 6y ago

Huh, didn't know there was a real world Zima Blue.

supernova87a 6y ago

A couple thoughts on Christo: 1. The "waste of resources" argument never held too much importance in my mind, because he and JC were able to pay for the art installations on their own, as "wasteful" as that may be. That they were able to convince wealthy donors to pony up $ is something I'm sure many aspire to. And who are we to complain if someone can get others to believe in an idea with private funding? VCs, anyone? Kudos to them for their persuasiveness. And separately, on the apparent quantities of material -- much of that was pretty completely recycled (metal, plastic), so it was chiefly the manufacturing and installation labor that was really spent. You could equally say that it also produced jobs wherever their art went. 2. I think the thing that leaves the more dissatisfied taste in my mouth is that much of it didn't seem like very innovative or even subjectively amazing art. It only seemed to be self-fulfilling. In the sense that it was like the Kardashians -- they only seem to be popular because everyone says they're popular. Yet I don't get why they're popular. And similarly, looking at the art itself, if you didn't know better, nothing would say, "amazing", "world changing". (personal taste, of course) You almost suspect that Christo's beginnings were spaghetti thrown against the wall, seeing if anyone would buy into some silly idea of wrapping something in colored plastic, like he was grasping for artistic straws. And it was only because he proposed something so large and crazy that it was different. And then when the first or 2nd one got some odd traction, it turned into an unexpected snowball. If he hadn't gotten any early success, you wouldn't look at the ideas and retrospectively say they were stunning, and what a shame they didn't get built. I will say that the NYC gates and others that people were able to walk through and enjoy en masse were fun. But people like walking around in colorful new things anyway -- occupy the family for a couple hours. You wouldn't call Disneyland "art" exactly. And it never shook me out of the nagging thought that there was something disproportionate -- maybe even "unfair" or overhyped about the popular success of the guy -- much like if the boss's son were to be winning a bunch of art shows sponsored by the family. Or that he was only an "artist" by virtue of being able to get people to pay for his experiments and the bigness of them. Anyway, at least we have the memories to think about.

lalalandland 6y ago
Art as a big polluter and waste of resources seem like a stretch. Biggest polluters are military and agriculture. I don't think art would make it on that list.

tin7in 6y ago

Interesting fact that might have affected his works and ultimately millions seeing them. Christo's father was a prominent chemical textile manufacturer in Bulgaria and Christo was probably exposed to fabrics and textile rolls very early in his life.

javajosh 6y ago

Rest in peace. He was by far my favorite wrapper.

goodsignal 6y ago

I designed and built a burning man shade structure for out camp with one of Christo's Running Fence panels that we found in an old barn in Northern California. I was so glad about how many of my 'neighbors' knew about Christo. I got a little street cred from that :)

nikolay 6y ago

As a Bulgarian, I'm saddened. As an environmentalist - I only am saddened that another human being has died, but not much. But as an inquiring mind I keep wondering: Is wrapping stuff up a mental condition or artistry? :D

ZacharyPitts 6y ago

A bit late, but here's a very unique photo of the "running fence" taking from my backyard as a kid in Petaluma, Ca. You can see it 'running' along the top of the hill in the background. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Running_Fence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Running_Fence the photo: https://i.imgur.com/VVzzZjz.jpg https://i.imgur.com/VVzzZjz.jpg

deleted 6y ago
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