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Designed Environment and Art of Christo and Jeanne-Claude
“Throughout the history of art, the use of fabric has been a fascination for artists. From the most ancient times to the present, fabric, forming folds, pleats and draperies, is a significant part of paintings, frescoes, reliefs and sculptures made from wood, stone and bronze.” Artistic undertakings of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, however, are exceptional in this regard. By use of ordinary fabric and rope these artists have created some of the most surprising, spectacular and provocative works of the 20th century. Some will mistakenly refer to them as – artists “wrappers”. There is, however, far more to Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s art than the wrapping they had become so closely associated with: “Christo and Jeanne-Claude touch the world with wonder. From the modest beginnings in Paris they have gone on, over a career of forty-three years, to wrap everything – from tin cans to a stretch of Australian coastline – and have created a body of work that has gone far beyond wrapping, retaining only the use of fabric as a common denominator.” I probably will not exaggerate asserting that Christo and Jeanne-Claude are artists who have experimented with and tested the physical, aesthetic and design qualities of the fabric, in their projects embracing the land and the sea, the rural and the urban environments, as no one else in the recorded art history. During their projects, millions and millions of square feet of fabric, a key element of their works, have been exposed to the effects of sun, wind and water, creating stunning and breathtaking sights. As Christo has described their passion and the profound decision to utilize cloth, then “fabric exists like our skin, or like the leaf on a tree. The leaves on the tree fall off, and our skin can be broken. All the elements of tension – sometimes involving real fears and serious technical problems – are normal because we are dealing with very fragile but at the same time powerful material. In a way you can find that quality in sailors, who fight the sails and the ocean’s force.” In a symbolic way, the artists themselves are like such sailors who consistently fight the ocean of very resistant social forces in order to get the permits for the realization of their works – their “scream of freedom”. For some of the projects this fight had lasted as long as 32 years , placing them among some of the most politicized and controversial art works in the history. Yet the artists do not recall those fights as “a bureaucratic nightmare”, instead they firmly believe that all the obstacles only enrich the identity of each work, creating some special chemistry, the soul and the magnitude of the project.
Who are they? It is impossible to classify Christo and Jeanne-Claude as artists, as it is difficult to define their art. As Jeanne-Claude notes, “the labels” are not important for what they are doing and agrees that the term “environmental artists” would work just fine. The qualities of their work, however, incorporate a very broad spectrum of competences. They are at once painters, sculptors, architects, engineers and urban planners and yet none of those. The artists characterize their work as “gentle disturbances” between earth and sky. It is important to note, however, that these “disturbances” always affect designed environment – be it urban or rural space. Christo and Jeanne-Claude never work in pristine nature, but rather borrow spaces that have already been touched and modified by human hand and mind, making them aesthetically complete. As Jeanne-Claude puts it, “those are places that are manipulated by human beings for human beings.” Do these “gentle disturbances” represent a clash or a dialogue with the designed world that embraces us? By adding new and qualitatively different layer, are the artists aesthetically overwriting, enhancing or masquerading the environment or are they just offering a cultured version of what has been in place before? Regardless of the position, their works are able to change the established equilibrium between appearance and reality, asserting the potential of a new visual approach in dealing with the ordinary. Art critic David Bourdon has given a very accurate description about the essence of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s work. He calls it “revelation through concealment”. In their monumental and architecture-scale endeavors, the artists “question the relationship of art to both the urban and rural environments. In a materialistic age, their art is a profound comment on the chronic expectations and frustrations aroused by the increasing number of consumer products and services that are “enhanced” through packaging. No other artist so fully illuminated the twentieth century’s preoccupation with packaging” . As Christo in this regard has commented, “all these objects are related to territory organization, territory limits. It’s something like clothing on a woman. The cloth on a woman is much more revealing than the naked woman.” As a nice design of package increases both the symbolic and exchange values of what’s inside, the works of Christo and Jeanne-Claude are revealing oftentimes unnoticed beauty and nuances of the spaces and objects they borrow for the projects. By creating such cultured environments, the artists are transforming these places and objects into works of art – even though for a short period of time (their projects are usually up for the period of two weeks).
Creating Cultured Environments or Enhancement through Fabric?
“Clothing-as-packaging touches most of us every day. And at nightfall, most of us get into cars or subways (transportation packages) to go to our homes (architectural packages).“ Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s passion is fabric. It is like a second skin which together with such natural elements as wind, light, and water creates works that exist like “living, breathing organisms”. Art historian Jan van der Mark has noted that “fabric is to Christo what steel had been to an earlier generation of modernist sculptors” . Through their work the fabric manifests things that cannot usually be seen, like the wind blowing, or the sun reflecting in ways it had not before – it is as if giving shape to the un-shapeable – the wind and the light.
Christo’s passion with fabric started in 1958. This period in his career also indicates a radical change in substance of his art. At that time Christo’s native Bulgaria was one of the Warsaw Pact countries and, as a young art student at the Sofia Academy of Arts, he quickly understood that if he were ever to encounter the modern art anywhere outside the covers of the books, he would have to leave the country, which he did in 1956. His dream destination was France, but it took him several stops in Prague, Vienna, and Geneva until he finally arrived and settled in Paris in March of 1958. Almost from the very beginning of his time in Paris he began to use fabric in his works. Christo wrapped cans, bottles, chairs, a car – anything he could find, everyday objects of no particular beauty or interest. In 1961, his collages revealed an ambitious transformation, enlarging his artistic vision toward the works of architectural, monumental scale. Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s idea was to wrap a public building, however, their first proposals all fell through. Only seven years later a Swiss art museum, the Kunsthalle in Bern, gave Christo his first opportunity to fully package an entire building. This colossal transformation, however, did not stop at just wrapped buildings or, as Bourdon describes them, monumental packages for urban spaces. In the decades from the late 1960s to early 1980s, Christo and Jeanne-Claude also created some of their most beautiful works in rural environments.
Their monumental scale outside projects could be classified in two big groups – rural and urban works. In most of their rural projects, like Valley Curtain, Running Fence, The Umbrellas and Over The River, the emphasis is not on wrapping, but on enhancement, on the creation of new shapes and images using the natural environment together with effects of fabric, motion and light. In those projects the artists create abstract forms that interact with the landscape. Exception was the Wrapped Coast, Little Bay in Australia, 1969 – the project, which involved wrapping of a mile and a half long stretch of coastline (approximately 2.4 kilometers). In their urban projects, however, the artists have quite consistently chosen to wrap-up well known architectural monuments. In these works, Christo and Jeanne-Claude appropriate the architectural structure and the form; the artists transform the monuments visually thus undermining their stability as images and as cultural and historical icons: the wrapped structures suddenly become “real architecture masquerading as objects” . Under the spell of fabric, the draped architecture is deprived of detail and formal nuances, revealing, however, the mere structural base in a beautifully minimal way. Through such an aesthetic approach, the artists are flattening and emphasizing a building's frame and reducing the structure to a strong, clear-cut and at the same time very sensual and elegant skin. Theoretically, their urban packages remind of the design principles of architect Adolf Loos who, in his famous Ornament and Crime, expressed the "passion for smooth and precious surfaces" , proclaiming that the evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from design of useful objects. In this regard, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s first realized rural project or “a terrestrial wrap-up” , Wrapped Coast, Little Bay in Australia, completed in 1969, implies not only aesthetic transformation of the site but also transformation of its usual formal significance: “by wrapping the edge of the continent, Christo and Jeanne-Claude would have transformed what was merely “peripheral” into something more concrete and discrete, giving a quasi-architectural entity to natural terrain” where “the wrapping objectifies the landscape without becoming a discrete object in its own right. It is both object and environment at the same time” . Little Bay is about 14.5 kilometers southeast of Sydney. The craggy shore-line stretch that was wrapped was about 2.4 kilometers long, up to 244 meters wide, and ranged from the sea level at the sandy beach to a height of 26 meters at the northern cliffs. 90,000 square meters of erosion control fabric (synthetic woven fiber usually manufactured for agricultural purposes) were used for the wrapping and 56.3 kilometers of polypropylene rope, 3.8 centimeter diameter, tied the fabric to the rocks. Australian visual artist, curator and writer, Imants Tillers, after the completion of the project commented: “the concept of art was so narrow at the time that Wrapped Coast appeared to be the work of a madman.” Curator Daniel Thomas, in his turn, described the work as “a spectacular, wonderful absurdity and beauty”. Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s terrestrial wrap-up, urban packages and rural installations suggest a refined “desire to have design control not only over the urban, man-made environment, but over all of rural site as well” . Artists’ heroic and epic ambitions assign their work some kind Don Quixotian feeling.
Even though working on a colossal scale, every surface and volume of their projects are meticulously articulated. All of their projects involve careful planning and testing, as well as quite authoritative aesthetic decisions like the color, texture and weight of the fabric, the manner of wrapping – loose or tight, the way of how ropes should be tied – “regular grid or following the contours of the terrain” . Nothing is left to chance. Christo and Jeanne-Claude approach their large scale projects like an architect, having carefully planned and detailed preparatory studies about the space or structure they are about to borrow for the project. As the artist explains: “I see my projects as having two major steps – software and hardware periods. The software period is when the project is in my drawings and sketches, photomontages, relief-collages, propositions, three-dimensional scale models, legal applications, and technical data. The second part – the hardware – is the physical making of the work. It is very much like a mirror, showing what we have worked at, it is the crowning of many, many years of hard work and expectation.”
Creating New Equilibrium
“What is really exciting is to borrow a space that has never been part of the art experience. In a gallery or a museum, that space is absolutely serene, pristine. Outside, in the real world, everything is owned by somebody. Twenty-four hours, around the clock, we are funneled through highly controlled space, designed by urban planners or politicians. That space is owned by so many people, with so many jurisdictions. We love that space and want to borrow it for a short moment to create a gentle disturbance.” Their created disturbances are colossal in scale and expressive visually, but, yes, – they are gentle in relation to the space that is borrowed. They definitely change the established equilibrium between appearance and reality, giving way to a new visual approach in dealing with the ordinary. Nonetheless there is something peculiar about Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s projects that make one think about new equilibrium that they create instead. There is some special and precious relationship that their works have with the spaces chosen for their display. Places and objects that they touch acquire a new layer that aesthetically, architecturally and visually blend with the surroundings. As Jeanne-Claude notes, “We inherit everything that is inherent in the space to become part of our work.” Explaining their aesthetic vision, Christo comments: “Traditional sculpture creates its own space. We take a space not belonging to sculpture, and make a sculpture out of it.” When accomplished, this vision becomes like an added value, new aesthetic quality to the natural and built environment that is to stay even after the removal of the work.
Valley Curtain at Rifle, Colorado (1970–1972) was the next significant outdoor project after the Australian coast near Sydney. The project took 28 months to complete and it was up for just 28 hours because of the gale that swept through the valley at a speed of 100 kmph, making it necessary to begin removal. “The wind is our best friend and, at the same time, our worst enemy,” commented Jeanne-Claude.
The Curtain measured 381 meters in widths and up to 111 meters in height, and remained clear of the slopes and the valley floor. The cables holding it in place spanned 417 meters, weighted 50 tons, and were anchored to 800 tons of concrete foundations. On a metal plaque, dedicated to the artists, the citizens of Rifle have called the project as “a pure and beautiful tribute to the imagination of man”. Even though the Curtain’s life was so short, for those 28 hours it completed the scenery, adding to it a visually spectacular accent. Valley Curtain was like a magic reflection, in a very expressive, but at the same time very organic way, mirroring the mountain’s slope behind the valley.
This short life span – the ephemeral quality – of all of their works have often been widely discussed and argued about within the art world, as well as media. Christo and Jeanne-Claude are very strict about this fleeting facet of their projects and have issued an explanation: “The temporary character of a work of art creates a feeling of fragility, vulnerability, and an urgency to be seen, as well as a presence of the missing, because we know it will be gone tomorrow. The quality of love and tenderness that human beings have towards what will not last, for instance the love and tenderness we have for childhood and our lives, is a quality we want to give our works as an additional aesthetic quality.”
“When The Great Wall of China dreams, it dreams that it is a Running Fence.” So the scientist, Professor Philip Morrison, signed his postcard sent to Christo and Jeanne-Claude after the completion of their Running Fence in Sonoma and Marin Counties, California (1972–1976). Art critics have described it as one of the most surprising and spectacular works of the century. Besides its aesthetic qualities, Running Fence is definitely one of the most controversial, politically and socially charged works of the artists. “The art project consisted of forty-two months of collaborative efforts, the ranchers' participation, eighteen public hearings, three sessions at the Superior Courts of California, the drafting of a four-hundred and fifty page Environmental Impact Report and the temporary use of hills, the sky and the ocean,” says the press release. In the late sixties the U.S. government decided that each human activity which has a great impact on human behavior should have an environmental-impact statement: “the Alaskan pipeline has an environmental-impact report, the Dallas Airport too.” This was the first E.I.R. ever done on a work of art.
Running Fence was 5.5 meters high and 40 kilometers long, extending across the properties of fifty nine ranchers near Freeway 101 north of San Francisco, and following rolling hills and dropping down to the Pacific Ocean at Bodega Bay. Art historian Werner Spies wrote, “The high, bulky curtain is transformed into lines that trace a drawing across the tawny land faded by heat and drought. An autonomous drawing, which sometimes follows the contours of the ground, but for the most part changes them, lopping off hilltops, inscribing a softer, dreamlike landscape over the existing one.” The Running Fence was as if sculpting the land and was, in turn, sculpted by light and wind. As Christo noted, it “gave shape to the wind”.
Surrounded Islands in Biscayne Bay, Greater Miami, Florida (1980–1983) could be described as the most poetic and picturesque work of the artists. 11 blooming islands like flowers that have just broken from the bud adorned the Biscayne Bay for two weeks. These man made islands in the heart of the city of Miami were surrounded with 585,000 square meters of pink woven polypropylene fabric covering the surface of the water, floating and extending out 61 meters from each island into the Bay. The fabric was sewn into 79 patterns to follow the contours of the 11 islands. These soft intrusions, accommodated to the natural environment, were as if symbolically merging with it – the surrounded islands “blended seamlessly into the surrounding environment. Not only did the project pick up on the pastels of the local architecture in this beautiful Latin city, but it even echoed the pinks and the blues of the indigenous flora.” Here the landscape had been metamorphosed into another, “beautiful reality, with luminous pink surrounds of fabric shining in breathtakingly unusual harmony with the tropical vegetation of the islands, the light of the Miami sky, and the colors of the shallow waters of the bay.”
The shrouded Pont Neuf could be seen as a very large sculpture in a traditional sense of antique folds and draperies, however, the bridge, while wrapped, remained a bridge, a piece of architecture – it was fully functioning during the wrapping process and also after the project was completed. Concealing a public building or structure, Christo and Jeanne-Claude had attained “a partial and ambiguous transformation, creating a giant object that resembles neither sculpture nor architecture” .
This David Bourdon’s description should be also assigned to Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Wrapped Reichstag in Berlin (1971–1995). It took them 25 years to finally fulfill the project. The result, however, of this long political saga was splendid. Christo and Jeanne-Claude had transformed the Reichstag into a huge and beautiful temporary sculpture. For a period of two weeks, the richness of the silvery fabric, shaped by the blue ropes, created a sumptuous flow of vertical folds highlighting the features and proportions of the imposing structure, revealing the essence of the Reichstag. 100,000 square meters of thick woven polypropylene fabric with an aluminum surface and 15,600 meters of blue polypropylene rope, 3.2 cm in diameter, were needed to wrap the Reichstag. The façades, the towers and the roof were covered by 70 tailor-made fabric panels, twice as much fabric as the surface of the building.
The second longest project of Chritso and Jeanne-Claude, the 26 year long odyssey of The Gates in Central Park, New York City, was finally completed in February 2005. In a sense, this was a very symbolic project for the artists for it was the first project realized in New York where they have lived and worked for forty five years. The 7,503 gates, 4.87 meters tall varied in width from 1.68 to 5.48 meters, according to the 25 different widths of walkways, on 37 kilometers of walkways in Central Park. Free-hanging saffron colored fabric panels, suspended from the horizontal top part of the vinyl gates, came down to approximately 2.13 meters above the ground. The gates were spaced at 3.65 meter intervals, except where low branches extended above the walkways.
It is interesting how the design of the 7,503 individual gates alluded to the park as an urban, man made landscape and the forms of the surrounding buildings. As Christo explains, such choice was made consciously. The very controlled framework, the geometric grid pattern of the hundreds city blocks surrounding Central Park was reflected in the rectangular structure of the commanding and sculptural saffron colored vinyl poles, while the serpentine design of the walkways and the organic shape of the bare branches of the trees was mirrored in the continuously changing, rounded and sensual movements of the free-flowing nylon panels moving in the wind. This project represents a lighter side of the artists’ works, the side seen so well in the Running Fence and Surrounded Islands, rather than monumental side that has been drawn to massive, urban architectural structures.
Evolutionary Relationship of the Projects
All of the artists’ projects are unique in a very literal sense of the word. The uniqueness resides in both: the technical and aesthetic qualities of their mammoth-scale undertakings. As Christo himself has noted, “We never do the same things again. We will never build another Gates, never another Running Fence, never another Surrounded Islands or wrap another parliament. Each project visually is totally different.” When looking at and when comparing their artworks, however, it is not difficult to notice that the artists’ body of work presents an innate relationship and logical sequence, indicating that idea of many of the works oftentimes originates in their previous projects. Even though each project has its own inspiration and creates its own aura throughout often very lengthy official procedures and preparations, it frequently embodies a detail that later surfaces as a precursor for a subsequent project. Much of the aesthetic and formal qualities of such “vertical separations” as Valley Curtain and The Running Fence come from Christo’s early work, namely, series of Store Fronts that he was working on during mid sixties.
A momentous installation detail during the project of the Pont Neuf, simultaneously noticed by both artists, was an original precursor for a project that Christo and Jeanne-Claude are working on at the moment – Over The River (estimated year of completion is 2012 at the earliest). Just seven years later this detail of construction from the Pont Neuf materialized in the sketches and drawings of the current project. What was that momentous revelation? It was a fleeting image: fabric suspended in mid-air – half way from one of the arches of the bridge. The sun was shining through it, reflecting on the water of the river Seine – just the way the artists are visualizing the project for the Arkansas River in Colorado.
There are also projects that instead of formal genesis are rather linked by their spatial qualities, embodying the vocabulary of architectural structures. Christo emphasized the way that The Gates, The Umbrellas, and Over The River “are very strongly linked with that inner and outer space. You can go under the umbrellas, you can go out the umbrellas. You can go under the gates, you can go out of the gates. The precursor of The Umbrellas was The Gates because the idea of The Gates was conceived several years earlier than the idea of The Umbrellas. The inner and outer space can already be found in the 1960s Store Front.”
Beside the formal and spatial features, there is also a bodily or physical corollary in all of the artists’ projects: “fabric is like a second skin; it is related to human existence. [..] fabric will move with the wind, the water, with the natural elements… The fabric is moving, like breathing. Reichstag fabric moved, the fabric of Running Fence moved, and the fabric of the Surrounded Islands moved. Of course, that energy of the wind is so much translated with The Gates. It is so incredibly present.”
The very uniqueness of the projects, however, presents also the major flaw that artists have to fight with over and over again starting every new project: “Everything on the world, in order to get the permission, is built on a precedent. When you want to build a skyscraper, a bridge or a highway there are certain rules in place of how to do that. Our biggest problem to obtain permission for the projects is that there has never, never been any precedent or any book written that would tell how to build a Valley Curtain or how to surround islands, or how to make Over the River.” This is why all of their projects require one-to-one life style tests built under actual conditions where the artists can test and determine precise technical and aesthetic details for the real projects. Christo and Jeanne-Claude admit that each project for them has been like a university education and a fabulous expedition at the same time.
Cultured Nature: an Act of Cultural Dictatorship?
The arguments about the definition of art have been fundamental to almost all the opposition that Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s projects have engendered, because in this “challenge to conventional definitions lies a metaphor for the loosening of other hierarchies as well, including the artificial distinction between “nature” and “culture” in the twenty-first century” . The question of desecration of nature in relation to Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s “gentle disturbances” within urban and even rural environments has been raised quite loudly among the opposition, revealing the shaky relationship between nature and culture or, rather, the intrinsic fallacy of the matter. The subject particularly applies to the projects of the artists, taking into consideration the fact that they always work in spaces that have been modified by human hand and mind before. Their works, however, have been called as acts of cultural dictatorship or imperialism over nature and its cycles of life. The Gates opponents claimed that “Central Park is the ‘Mona Lisa’ of landscape” and artists should stay away from desecrating it by their undertakings. What is seriously lacking in this discussion is the critical awareness and historical memory of the fact that so many aspects of our lives are artificially designed that we have come to accept them as natural, we have bonded with them so much that we stop seeing them as artificial. In reality, however, we are very much living in a designed environment – inside and out. Two projects, Surrounded Islands and The Gates, bring this unsettled issue of nature–culture relationship to the foreground and particularly well reveal “the contemporary amnesia”, showing that today people have a strong tendency to forget the fact that we are living in an increasingly constructed landscape, in every realm of our lives. This is particularly omnipresent in contemporary urban planning and the historical development of parks. Central Park is an entirely man made landscape, it is a perfect rectangle that is cut out of the carefully planned grid of New York City’s streets: “Central Park is a constructed experience of nature, in the tradition of the great “planned” natural landscapes of Romantic England.” Before describing The Gates project as a “moustache on the Mona Lisa”, we should realize that this Mona Lisa is nothing else than a perfect simulacrum, – a secondary, inferior association of the original we are so boldly talking about. Environmentalist Jennifer Cypher and anthropologist Eric Higgs expressed worry that very soon “the boundary between artificiality and reality will become so thin that the artificial will become the centre of moral value” , which has happened in the case of almost all of the artists’ works where serious environmental concerns were raised. In this regard, it is difficult to talk about the artists’ works in terms of ‘cultured nature’ or ‘cultural dictatorship’ due to the fact that, by definition, their undertakings can be perceived just as complementary to the designed environment – be it urban or rural.
An Extraordinary Partnership: collaboration, finances, and art-for-art’s-sake
Christo and Jeanne-Claude represent the most extraordinary artistic partnership of our time and their projects are the most extraordinary adventures of the 20th century. Often, however, their works have been mistakenly referred to the name of Christo only. As Christo remarks, “Everybody knows that we have worked together for over forty years.” It is important to clarify that in the early 1960s, starting with Dockside Packages, and especially with Wall of Oil Barrels, The Iron Curtain, Rue Visconti, Paris 1961–1962, Jeanne-Claude actively participated in the realization of their creations on both the organization and aesthetic levels. “My drawings are the scheme of the project. After that, we do everything together,” says Christo. Jeanne-Claude cannot draw; however, she is the one who deals with the financial matters of the projects unassisted. A close friend of Jeanne-Claude, Carole Weismeiller, has given a very accurate observation in this regard, “I was absolutely amazed at the success of Wrapped Coast. They are an extraordinary couple, like an eagle with two heads.”
It was in 1994 that they officially announced and publicly clarified their long-standing artistic interdependence, acknowledging their past and present co-authorship of the large-scale outside projects. Henceforth, they were both to be credited as a single artist – Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Small scale inside objects, all preparatory works – drawings, collages, sketches, photomontages – are, however, works of art done exclusively by Christo and are credited as such.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude conceived and carried out the unprecedented method of personally financing all of their projects. The scale of the cost of their undertakings has oftentimes created unneeded controversies and lots of misleading debating in the media. The fact, however, is that, to avoid the loss of artistic control that often comes with donors and sponsors, Christo and Jeanne-Claude never accept state funds or sponsorships; nor do they make money from souvenirs, films, books, or photographs of their work. They fund all their projects by means of “aesthetic recycling”, that is, the sale of Christo’s original works – drawings, collages, painted photographs, scale models, created in connection with their projects, as well as his wrapped objects that have been created during artist’s earlier career in the 50s and 60s. Moreover, Christo stops making collages and drawings once they have realized the project. Except incredible emotional fulfillment, they do not materially benefit from the project. They are free for everyone to enjoy. As Jeanne-Claude puts it, “Each one of our works is a scream of freedom.” During the hardware process of the project, artists do not use volunteers either. All the workers are paid a-little-over-the-minimum wages (except 11 architecture students in Australia in 1969).
Christo and Jeanne-Claude operate outside the art system. All of their works are primarily a personal challenge for personal and private gratification that is free from the conditioning of critics, museums, collectors and dealers. “Our projects are irrational, irresponsible, unnecessary, and useless. Nobody needs a Running Fence or a Valley Curtain. We need it. We have unstoppable and unexplainable urge to realize these projects,” explains Christo. Albert Elsen has made an important conclusion in regard to Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s artistic undertakings: “In the late twentieth century they are also tributes to artistic freedom. They confront what does exist with what they alone have determined can exist as a dramatic and beautiful form. Their art therefore is the result of intelligence and aesthetic intuition added to the natural and built environment.”
Even though the artists do not profit from the projects financially, their projects have proved to be highly beneficial for the local economies. The few recorded accounts show that Berlin made about $700 million in increased tourism; The Gates brought New York $256 million in additional taxes in 2005, and it is estimated that the profit related with Over The River project could reach up to $200 million.