Culture Making (eBook)

Culture is what human beings make of the world, but not everything that human beings make shapes culture.

In 1979 the flamboyant artist couple Christo and Jeanne-Claude (in our culture, people signal artistic flamboyancy by using only their first names) conceived of a project called The Gates. They imagined lining the paths of New York City’s Central Park with saffron-colored curtains mounted on steel arches. A proposal to the New York City Parks Department was rejected—the department said that Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s proposal was “in the wrong place and the wrong time and in the wrong scale”—and the idea languished in their studio, dormant though never forgotten, for more than twenty years. Only a few people in the community of artists knew about the project.

The vision for The Gates, as with all art and all culture, was to make something of the world—in this case, the “world” of Central Park, which is itself a grand exercise in world making by the landscape designers Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. Even when The Gates was just a set of sketches and pastel drawings, it was already a cultural good in one sense—the work of human beings trying to make something of the world.

But if The Gates had never been actually produced, it would never have become a fully realized cultural good. Go back to the diagnostic questions we asked in chapter one and imagine asking them of The Gates in the year 1999 when it was just a collection of sketches, proposals and maps, along with further ideas found only in the artists’ imaginations and conversations. What does The Gates, circa 1999, assume about the way the world is? What does it assume about the way the world ought to be? We could certainly answer these questions. The Gates, circa 1999, assumes the existence of Central Park, its significance in the life of New York City and its wider significance as an emblem of the possibilities of urban spaces. It assumes the chilly, leafless, barren terrain of a New York February (the project was always envisioned for midwinter). It assumes that the world should be adorned, at least from time to time and temporarily, with billowing fabrics that reveal and yet sometimes also conceal paths, hills and valleys. It assumes—in significant tension with many artists’ convictions, especially in the modern and postmodern eras—that art should be colorful, accessible, fun and free to the public.

But then move on to the next three questions. What does The Gates, circa 1999, make possible? What does it make impossible, or at least much more difficult? What new forms of culture are created in response? We’re stuck. There is little to say because The Gates, twenty years after it was first proposed, had had almost no effect to speak of. About the only cultural artifacts that had been created in response were a few bureaucratic documents categorically rejecting the artists’ proposal. And perhaps those documents did make some things impossible, or at least much more difficult, if they discouraged other would-be flamboyant artists from proposing any such works for Central Park. The Gates, circa 1999, was an artifact—a human effort to make something of the world—but it was not yet fully culture. Which is another way of saying that it was not yet—and as far as its creators knew, might never be—shared by a public.

Culture requires a public: a group of people who have been sufficiently affected by a cultural good that their horizons of possibility and impossibility have in fact been altered, and their own cultural creativity has been spurred, by that good’s existence. This group of people does not necessarily have to be large. But without such a group the artifact remains exclusively personal and private. It may be deeply meaningful to its owners—Christo and Jeanne-Claude may have treasured their sketches and maps in the privacy of their studio—but it has not reshaped the world for anyone. At least not yet.

As it happened, in 2003 a new mayor and new parks commissioner finally approved a somewhat revised proposal for The Gates. Michael Bloomberg, a successful businessman turned mayor, was clearly motivated more by millions of dollars in potential tourist revenue than any intrinsic artistic merits of the work itself. Christo and Jeanne-Claude had modified their plan so that no trace would be left when the installation was removed, and they themselves underwrote the $20 million in costs with proceeds from sales of their other works. And Central Park was a different place than it was in 1979, thanks to various cultural developments—cleaner, safer, more hospitable and far more widely visited by New Yorkers and out-of-town visitors alike. On February 12, 2005, “The Gates, Central Park: 1979-2005” unfurled for a sixteen-day run.

Hundreds of thousands of city residents and visitors walked through the park during those sixteen days. And suddenly it became possible to answer the three questions that were unanswerable before. What did The Gates make possible? Artists and city officials answered this question differently: the artists could point to the ways that the installation helped visitors see Central Park’s winding paths afresh; the mayor pointed to the revenue the city earned from the influx of tourists. What did The Gates make impossible, or at least much more difficult? It made it impossible to reserve a hotel room in Manhattan during the two weekends of the installation—normally not a problem in the dead of winter. The artists’ willingness to fully fund their own artwork, praised by Mayor Bloomberg, might well make it more difficult for public support of the arts, especially grand public installations, to gain widespread support. What new culture was created in response? Newspapers and magazines published articles celebrating, criticizing and interpreting the project; reproductions of the artists’ sketches and drawings, formerly languishing in their studio, were sold at a premium to eager buyers, with the proceeds funding a New York arts foundation; and no doubt, the fertile imaginations of Christo and Jeanne-Claude were already at work on an even grander project somewhere in the world, its prospects enhanced by the popular success of their venture in Central Park.