as we are told in yesterday’s headline of the Columbia Daily Spectator reporting on the opening of an HBO documentary reminding us of the long gestation of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Saffron Gates in Central Park, New York City?
Or does Saffron spell enthusiasm? Here is my snapshot of Saffron cloth billowing in the wind on a snow-free day, February 2005.
The actual installation of the Saffron Gates – only fourteen days long – contrasts with the length of their virtual reality. Negotiations for the Saffron Gates started in 1979. And now, three years after their short residence in the Central Park, the HBO documentary chronicles the tenacious negotiations by the artists with NYC administrators and the evolution of public opinion regarding the Saffron Gates.
While early negotiation with the city administration, just emerging from a fiscal crisis, were unsuccessful, more than 20 years later – post-9/11 – Michael R. Bloomberg enthusiastically embraced Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Saffron Gates project.
Antonio Ferrara, co-director of the HBO documentary, said on the day when the Gates were installed
I started to cry on blossoming day. The last time people were looking up they were seeing a lot of bad shit happening a few years before.
I too remember watching people exploring the Saffron Gates, expectant and joyous like young children on their birthday.
My snapshot of the Saffron Gates, so far, has given rise to dissent rather than enthusiasm. Anne-Émilie, a landscape architectural designer, had googled for an image showing the effects of wind. My photo captured her interest. She asked me whether she could use it for her current project as well as for any other professional work in the future.
My answer ‘Wonderful! Pay me one dollar and you use can my photo for anything you want’ did not make her happy. First, she complained about the endless red tape that I asked her to do. Several emails later, she encouraged me to ask for more money so that her paperwork would not look silly. I increased the price for giving up my rights to the photo from $1 to $1,000. Later, in a final email, I learned that she did not want to engage in a bidding war and had found another image on the web that she could use for free. I wished her good luck!
I still cannot decide who behaved more weirdly, Anne-Émilie or I?
Birgit
Re your last question — weirdness is always a matter of convention, and it may be that the light touch that you displayed in your $1 asking price has gone so far out of conventional style that you are the weird one.
But if this is the case, I’m all for bringing it back into conventional wisdom. $1 for lifetime rights — now there’s a convention I can dig. And I did like the jump from $1 to $1000. Sounded just right to me — that part wasn’t weird at all.
Birgit:
Perhaps not coincidentally I ran across a documentary on these gates this evening while cruising channels. Such a simple idea, yet so manifold.
Birgit:
Didn’t catch it last time around, but now I see what you did with that second superimpositional image. That’s the N.Y. skyline with the World Trade Center buildings in there. If I’m right, Bloomberg O.K.ed the gates project in part as a result of 911 – he recognizing it as a wonderful positive and mood-raising project. But then the saffron cloth blows away from the ghostly buildings in a manner evocative of the fire and ejecta on that fateful day. What a grand interweaving of themes!
June,
I had the following email interchange after publishing this post:
Birgit, why bother charging her a dollar?
Clearly, asking for $1 had a symbolic significance. In the past, I have given away for free plenty of good stuff, decent furniture, jewelry, not to mention clothing. Why not give away my Saffron Gates photo? My answer is that this photo means more to me than material possessions. Knowing that few people appreciate what they obtain for free, I wanted to set a price for it, no matter how low.
My initial asking price of $1 had to do with my emotions, my deep appreciation of Native American Indian art. The professional landscape designer wanted my Saffron Gates photo for a project involving Native American tribes. Asking for $1 meant not siphoning money off the tribal project but at the same time testing for the appreciation of my Saffron Gates photo. The professional designer did appreciate it as evident from her considering to pay me a small sum for it. She also revealed a lack of sensitivity by not realizing that offering me 50 bucks or so for something that I cherish was absurd considering that I have a ‘day job’ to support myself.
Birgit, you and I are academics! We give away our ideas (photos?) for free.
Here on A&P, over the last year or so, we had extensive discussions on why artists have to have ‘day jobs’ to survive. [searching for ‘ day jobs’ within the Art & Perception website result in 10+ pages of Google listings.]
I, an embryonic artist, used the salary from my day job to pay for the camera that took the 2005 photo of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Saffron Gates. And now, in 2008, how to afford/justify the upgrade to the latest technology – buying a ‘full-sensor’ digital SLR – is a thought that I occasionally indulge in.
My subsequent, requested price for the Saffron Gates of $1,000 was very reasonable. Selling a hundred editions of this photo, 8×10 inches, at a price of $25 dollars per print would yield $2,500 with an expected net gain of $1,000.
Was it crass on my part asking for any money at all for my Saffron Gates photo considering what I owe to New York City? In my first 20 years as immigrant, I reveled in its cultural, ethnic and scientific wealth and diversity and even experienced much kindness from its people. Now, for the last decade, because my commuter marriage to a man working in Manhattan, I have been part of it again, experiencing both the bad and good happening to this great city.
Overlaying the twin towers with the Saffron Gates feels like a strong statement to me, almost of a religious nature. Is it wrong to ask for money for what one feels strongly? Weren’t artists in the past paid for their images of the Crucification of Jesus Christ and the Madonna suckling her babe?
Jay,
What a grand interweaving of themes!
What a wonderful complement from an ‘old artist’ to an embryonic artist.
Birgit,
Your response captured completely my feeling about certain pieces of art. The insult of $50 really rings a bell. $1 or $1000, nothing in-between. A generous offer! This reminds me of our friend Boggs, the artist who paints money. He would give his “money” in return, for example, for his restaurant meal, but only if it were accepted wholly. No parsing out $4US for the bread and $4Boggs for the milk.
Now of course, we all would take the Boggs and have our pension funds greatly enhanced.
Your manipulation of the photo is effective. Ordinarily I’m not much into the “neon” look but in this case, the vivid coloration enhances the sense of the wind across the background of the city.
Thanks, Jay, for making me look again and again. I didn’t note the layering until you pointed it out.
June,
Thank you for your critique. I will play with the ‘neon look’.
You offered from your heart. Hurray for you and no you were not weird. It’s worth so much more. even $1000 would have been a bargin. I tip my hat and salute you for who you are and that you still have such honor.
Birgit,
I agree with June: you’re the weird one, and it’s much to your credit. And I admire your creativity with the superpositions. I especially like in this one the way that patches of sky and lights below echo the fluttering capes.
Thanks, Ginger and Steve,
I am trying to, as one of the presidential candidates is quoted as singing:
“Lighten up and get a life”
Birgit, your increase in price from $1 to $1,000 was appropriate as far as I’m concerned. More artists should have pricing structures like that – one price for normal people, and a much higher price for jerks! It discourages bad behavior. If Anne-Émilie considers writing you a check for $1 and signing your release form to be “endless red tape” she’s in for a big surprise someday when she tries to do her landscape architectural designing for a real client in a real city or county somewhere.
We also watched the Gates documentary the other night on HBO, and found it incredibly inspiring. I had worked on Christo’s Umbrellas here in California, and have been a big fan of his work for years. But the documentary brought out an aspect of his work that I hadn’t thought much about, the endless political hurdles he had to overcome, with all those committee meetings and people’s inane objections to his project. And that all it took was for one person, Bloomberg, to finally say sure, let’s do it. That was a good reminder.
David,
Thanks – kindred spirit