GroupThink, the Arts and Croissants Crowd and "The Gates"

You can't not like it. "The Gates", that is...:

"The Gates" — the $20 million what-the-hell-is-this-thingamabob that's spread out across Central Park like an endless row of construction cones shutting down two lanes on Interstate 95 — is a perfect example of how you can get the famously argumentative and opinionated leadership class in New York City to march in cultural lockstep.

Anxiety about not being with-it enough continues to be the dominant aspect of the cultural life of New York. Nobody knows that better than Christo and Jeanne-Claude — the brilliantly entrepreneurial snake-oil salesmen who designed "The Gates" and managed after 25 years to foist it (or them) on Central Park for a couple of weeks.

You weren't going to catch anybody in Central Park making a negative peep about the whole project, lest he or she be considered uncool, uncouth, narrow-minded, philistine, incapable of recognizing innovative art when he saw it.

So what if walking through the park simulated nothing so much as traveling through a car wash without the car?

If either of my readers has ever heard the term, "mind numbed robots," and applied it to the audience of a certain radio talk show host, I bid you to reconsider the intended focus of that pejorative phrase and ponder whether or not the groupthinking myrmadonic fans of "The Gates" might, themselves, qualify for that marginalized moniker.