The artist Christo is in the news again with his proposed art installation ‘Over the River’. The New York Times reports:
Assessing a work of art using in-depth technical analysis sounds a bit like writing a scholarly treatise about a joke. If you peer inside too deeply, armed with numbers and equations, does “Mona Lisa” still dazzle? And is “A man walks into a bar…” still funny?
But that, in a nutshell, is the question that faces the artist Christo and a giant federal agency called the Bureau of Land Management. On Friday, the bureau issued what may be the first ever draft environmental impact statement purely about art — specifically a project called “Over the River,” which Christo has proposed building along a stretch of the Arkansas River in southern Colorado.
The project involves laying fabric panels along 42.4 miles of the river. The environmental review analyzed that notion to its nub — from the projected size of the crowds, to the specific spots for anchoring fabric pieces, to what the document described as “temporal considerations,” specifically the timing of the phases of construction and operation of the artwork.
Christo, whose outsize environmental constructions have made him an internationally known, but not always well-understood, figure in the art world for decades, expressed delight. An environmental assessment, he said in a telephone interview, and the struggle to get permission to make his art are in fact part of the artistic vision itself for “Over the River.”
From ‘Over the River’:
The artist.
‘The Gates’ in Central Park.
