I think assessing art on the scale of Christo's latest empaquitage is not so simple. But let me say up front that for anyone to be creative at all now is a plus. But in this instance, like most where a rich establishment artist imposes work on the public (did we get any say in whether we wanted our park to be taken over and festooned by Christo? Did the parks commission have a say? Or was it just Puff Puff Bloomberg's say so?) a lot of the work's merit has to do with what the artist's motive was. And that is not easy to know even if they are professing their motive publicly (all the more reason to be cautious about their motive). For me in this case a lot of this has to do with the priviledged position Christo assumed as a friend of Puff Puff Bloomberg as well as the aesthetic that accommodates the giant ego behind a massive 'public' art work. Jean Claude says Christo and her make art just for themselves. In a sense all art shows how artists are self-indulgent. Some of the best art in my opinion is self-indulgent art, it just depends on what the artist's motive was. When Vito Acconci shows us a close up photo of his asshole, or William Wegman speaks directly into the video lens while holding his dog in his lap like it was a child while he unselfconsciously strokes the dog's balls, I'm not sure that is the kind of self-indulgence that really speaks to anyone else. So regarding Christo, just because a work of art is 'public' in its design, that does not necessarily free it from being over-ridingly an egotistically off-putting acte-de-presence. There may be more art to the gates in the coordination of their sheer production and hornswaggling of the local city bureaocracy than in their symbiosis with the park landscape. I like Christo and Jean Claude mostly for their personalities. They seem to be genuinely warm and smart. His artistic vision is unique. But there are many more examples than are needed of where huge, colorful, massively expensive, and nice to look at do not translate in to art that works on any other levels but those material, expenditure-based characteristics. But then, maybe that is the perfect aesthetic for public art in New York City. The art just has to appear to be another example of capital itself -capital of the psyche, finances and civic landscape. Maybe that is all it really needs to be to pass as art here; big, expensive and easy on the eyes.